No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Status between Law and Religion: Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2024
Abstract
The juridical status of persons nowadays tends to be discussed only in narrow contexts: civic status (citizen, alien, and various visa statuses), marital status, penal status, employment status, religious or ethnic status within colonial and postcolonial states, status of the fetus, corporate personal status, and so on. In the century and a half since Henry Maine’s 1861 treatise, Ancient Law, in which he discerned a general movement from status to contract in progressive societies, broad discussions of status as a general feature of law are few, so a renewed comprehensive approach to the issue remains a desideratum. This symposium, which has its origins in an interdisciplinary conference held in November 2019 at Washington and Lee University School of Law, is a step in that direction. The articles and essay gathered here illuminate the multifarious ways in which juridical status of persons overlaps with religious conceptions of persona and status. They provide grounds for seeing the religious component as distinctive because of the uniquely privileged authority attributed to divinely mandated status distinctions and the urgency of claims to religious rights. They also show how a juridical status can straddle law and religion, and how legal institutions handle such hybrid forms of status.
- Type
- Symposium Introduction
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
References
1 Recent exceptions include Kaiponanea T. Matsumura, Breaking Down Status, 98 Washington University Law Review 671 (2021) (demonstrating the useful insights that can be gained from examining contemporary legal problems from the point of view of status); George Letsas, Offences Against Status, 43 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 322 (2023). Before these recent contributions, the generally referenced discussion of juridical status was J. M. Balkin, The Constitution of Status, 106 Yale Law Journal 2313 (1997), who described how juridical status can reflect social status but also “map” and even “constitute” it. Balkin, supra, at 2324–26. See also Eric J. Mitnick, Law, Cognition, and Identity, 67 Louisiana Law Review 823 (2007). For status in ancient law, see Timothy Lubin et al., Status and Family, in Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law (Caroline Humfress, David Ibbetson, and Patrick Olivelle, eds., forthcoming).
2 Status and Justice in Law, Religion, and Society: A Conference at Washington and Lee University, 1–3 November 2019, https://status-and-justice2019.academic.wlu.edu (last visited Oct. 18, 2023).
3 Pratima Gopalakrishnan, Wives’ Work: Gender and Status in a List from the Mishnah, 38 Journal of Law and Religion (2023) (this issue).
4 Id.
5 Id.
6 Kameliya Atanasova and Matthew Chalmers, The Status of Samaritans in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Damascus, 38 Journal of Law and Religion (2023) (this issue).
7 Id.
8 Id.
9 Günther-Dietz Sontheimer, Religious Endowments in India: The Juristic Personality of Hindu Deities, 67 Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft 45 (1965).
10 Gregory Schopen, The Buddha as an Owner of Property and Permanent Resident in Medieval Indian Monasteries, 18 Journal of Indian Philosophy 181 (1990).
11 Deepa Das Acevedo, Deities’ Rights, 38 Journal of Law and Religion (2023) (this issue).
12 In re IYLA v. State of Kerala and In re People for Dharma, I.A. No. 30 of 2016 in WP(C) 373 of 2006, ¶ IV(4).
13 Indian Const., art. 25.
14 Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala, (2019) 11 SCC 1, 94–97 (¶¶ 88–96) (discussing the denominational test); 102–06 (¶¶ 112–26) (discussing the essential practices test) (Misra, C.J.).
15 Id. at 97 (¶ 96). On this point, see Deepa Das Acevedo, Just Hindus, 45 Law & Social Inquiry 965 (2020).
16 Id. at 235 (¶ 403).
17 J. Sai Deepak cited Rambrahma v. Kedar (1922) 36 C.L.J. 478, 483, to support this position. See In re People for Dharma, supra note 12, ¶ IV(1). In Rambrahma, however, the court used the language “conceived as a living being.” Rambrahma, 36 C.L.J. at 483.
18 Salim v. State of Uttarakhand, WP(C) 126 of 2014 (2017), at ¶ 19.
19 This subject arises in another symposium arising from the conference on status and justice; see Timothy Lubin, Status in Ancient and Medieval Law: Introduction, 63 American Journal of Legal History 61, 64–65 (2023), and Melissa Vise, The Matter of Personae in Medieval Italy, 63 American Journal of Legal History 131 (2023).
20 Bank of the United States v Deveaux, 9 U.S. 61 (1809).
21 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Oraby’s contribution in the conference itself was drawn from her forthcoming monograph, Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (2024). In it, she lays out the strategies by which Egypt’s religious minorities (Coptic Christian and Baháʼí) have sought to secure their position in the wake of the 2011 uprising and subsequent repression. She shows how they did so by affirming their difference and embracing and instrumentalizing legal administrative and judicial structures (with a zeal that Oraby deems to amount to devotion) to ensure that their religious status was recognized and protected by the state. Some may find an echo here of Atanasova and Chalmers’s argument in their contribution to the present symposium.
23 Méadhbh McIvor, Representing God: Christian Legal Activism in Contemporary England (2020); Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (2021).
24 Mona Oraby, Life at the Margins: Religious Minorities, Status, and the State, 38 Journal of Law and Religion (2023) (this issue).
25 Stolzenberg and Myers, supra note 23, at 380.