On October 23-25, 2009, the Journal of Law and Religion celebrated its twenty-fifth year of publication devoted to “Speaking about Law and Religion” with a Symposium that brought a diverse group of scholars. A highlight of that Symposium was a celebratory luncheon held on October 24 that featured a conversation about law and religion between Douglas Sturm, Professor Emeritus, Becknell University, and Milner Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Georgia School of Law. These two scholars, one a theologian who takes law seriously in his work, and one a lawyer who takes theology seriously in his work, have inspired many to enter the conversation about the intersection of law and religion to which each of them have made so many contributions over the years.

Among Milner Ball's many contributions is the inspiration he provides to many who, like him, seek to explore a new vision of law as an enterprise that can nurture the life of all in the world we share, and the courage he displays by drawing on theology for this task. He demonstrated this many years ago by posing a provocative question to a critic of his work who said, “she did not want or expect theology” in reading a draft of his book Lying Down Together: Law, Metaphor, and Theology. Milner's response was “if not theology, then what?” Since then he has continued to offer his own contributions that take this question seriously at the very heart of his work. Two notable examples, The Word and the Law (University of Chicago Press 1993), and Called by Stories: Biblical Sagas and their Challenge for Law (Duke University Press 2000).

Howard Vogel invited Doug Sturm and me to explain ourselves. Why did we take up law? Why theology? And why law and theology together? He encouraged us to offer personal accounts in response, and I am glad to comply.

Why law? The answer is simple. I had no choice. I was ordained to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in 1961, and in 1962 became minister to a small congregation in a small town in middle Tennessee. In 1966 I was named the Presbyterian Campus Minister at the University of Georgia. My wife, June, our children and I moved to Athens.

The Presbyterian Center was notorious for its faithful witness in difficult, explosive times. I had read about the Center and its work a couple of years earlier in a New Yorker magazine article by Calvin Trillin. That article was subsequently incorporated into a well-taken book about the liberating trauma of integration in Georgia, especially at the University.

When Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter desegregated the University of Georgia, they were greeted by massive, violent riots.

Minority students who followed Charlayne and Hamilton and enrolled in the University, were subject to no less intimidation. The Presbyterian Center was a place of refuge for them, and some lived in apartments on the premises. In due course, the Center became a gathering place for people committed to remedying racism.

Categories such as religion and law are social constructs, proposed for some purpose or other, good or ill, but whose use is worthy of serious question. Consider, e.g., Karl Barth's insistence that Christianity is not a religion or Dietrich Bonhoeffer's coinage of “religionless Christianity.” I will later offer a way of delineating how I use these categories of religion and law, but I am mindful in doing so that there are many ways these, and allied terms, are invoked. We should acknowledge, for instance, that there are many Christianities; many forms of Buddhism; and differing kinds of Islam. We should take note of the serious question whether "customary law" is really “law.” How about “natural law”—is it really law or a “brooding omnipresence in the sky”? Are Torah, Shari'a, Dharma, and Tao cognate terms in some sense? Are they simultaneously “religion” and “law”? In what respect are canon law and common law both “lawful”? Should we adopt Wittgenstein's proposal that words, after all, are but tools embracing a “family of meanings”?

The claim that talmudic law is a religious legal system has long been, and continues to be, put forward by both traditional scholars of Jewish law and contemporary academic researchers.

The question of whether talmudic law is a religious legal system most certainly did not engage the Sages of the Talmud, but addressing it will help us grasp the nature of talmudic law. Furthermore, juxtaposing talmudic law to Biblical law will help us delineate the concept of religious law, and shed light on certain developments in the evolution of Jewish law.

Let us consider what this claim entails. Sometimes the assertion that a given legal system is a religious legal system merely seeks to indicate that it is part of a certain religion or was created within the framework of that religion. Such an assertion does not provide any information about the nature of the said system, just as the phrase “French law” says nothing more than that the system is used in France.

This paper explores the ethical and legal pedagogy of the current debates on “reforming” Muslim societies, whether they claim to reform social and legal systems, reform educational institutions, or liberate Muslim women. Since these debates claim to achieve balance in global or domestic conflicts, I address the foundations of these debates by answering three questions:

1. Are the rationales for American and/or European governments' interventions justified?;

2. Can the discipline of civil law help in rethinking Islam for Muslims; and

3. Are Muslims themselves ready to critically address the use and misuse of Islam's primary sources (the Qur'an and particularly the Hadith) in their rethinking of Islam?

I argue that rather than seeking to “reform others,” in this case Muslims with an elitist attitude and sometimes violent interventions, we scholars of law and religion, scholars of Islam, policy-makers, and social justice researchers would be better off if:

1. we thought of Islam as a religio-moral rational worldview, rather than a set of laws,

2. we recognized Muslims as subject to historical transformation, like any other religious groups, and understood how they developed their present views of Islam, and

3. we considered our own real responsibilities to address the forms of global injustices as powerful shapers of world politics, particularly the politics of difference—the view that the “other” is inferior, and women's role as mostly complementary to men.

Several highly critical theological responses to political liberalism have appeared in recent years. John Milbank, continuing his onslaught on all things modern, complains that political liberalism's “empty heart” suffers from a “totalitarian drift” toward “an increasingly joyless and puritanical world.” For Oliver O'Donovan, liberalism is “a false posture of transcendence” and modernity is “conceived as Antichrist, a parodie and corrupt development of Christian social order.” Robert Song warns against “the partial and limited character” of liberalism's freedoms and proclaims that “a responsible theology will learn to articulate its ‘No’” to liberal political society. Other commentators offer critiques of particular aspects of political liberalism, often suggesting revisions based on their own theological perspectives. These critical voices join others such as Stanley Hauerwas, one of liberalism's most outspoken theological critics for more than a quarter century, and they continue a line of critique that extends back through Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth.

Not all the theological voices are critical. Christophe Insole, for example, finds that “politically liberal principles are compatible with a full-blooded and theologically main-stream Christian commitment.” Several Roman Catholic theologians have commented on the increasing mutuality between liberal democracy and Roman Catholic political and social teachings. Paul Sigmund notes that “the relation between Catholicism and liberal democracy has now become a positive and, one would hope, a mutually reinforcing one, even if there are a number of continuing tensions between them.” And Daniel Dombrowski offers a general defense of Rawlsian liberalism against claims that it is hostile to religion.

In this paper, I want to consider how the law navigates the space lying between the concepts of faith and religion so as to effectively induce change in institutions defined by their religious expression without distorting the faith reposed by individual believers in their religious institution. In order to consider whether this is possible, we must first consider whether the seemingly twin concepts of faith and religion are so intertwined that they are inseparable, or whether they lie in different planes, with the law regulating conduct that expresses the faith, and thereby potentially affecting both concepts.

In considering this problem, I would suggest that religion or religious dictates generally offer to guide the believer toward the attainment of salvation, often conceived of as adherence to religious dictates. In my view, however, reducing the concept of salvation to adherence to religious dictates would rob it of its character as a comprehensive set of beliefs and commitments held by individual believers, whatever the particular religion they follow. In essence, “salvation” lies within the individual believer and while compliance with religious dictates may be part of that process, ultimately, whether one has achieved salvation is entirely determined by the individual. “Salvation” resonates from the faith held by the individual, while religion is simply a means of expressing that faith.

Since the founding of the Journal of Law and Religion, burgeoning numbers of distinctively interdisciplinary approaches have appeared in the study of law including feminist jurisprudence, sociological jurisprudence, critical and postmodern legal studies, and law and religion. These approaches enrich the theoretical and practical dimensions of law. Nevertheless, in response to such conversations, the legal academy has been buffeted by disciplinary impulses toward marginalization, tribalism, and balkanization. These impulses can attenuate the prospects for interdisciplinary conversations by simplifying plural realities and multifarious foci into dichotomies (“us” and “them”) or totalities (“us”).

They reflect the conceptual challenges of the complexity of culture, which, according to theologian David Tracy, includes “a diminishment of belief in the possibility of authentic civic discussion in the community.” This diminishment of belief in discussion on a broader civic level has also contributed to facile assumptions about the unlikelihood of interdisciplinary conversations between law and religion.

Individuals and communities play critical roles, both theoretically and practically, in the preservation and development of Jewish law. Some of these roles allow for considerable autonomy, at least if that term is understood as the employment of one's intellectual creativity and ethical judgment. Jewish law does not purport to micromanage all of a person's decisions. Quite the contrary, in many instances, it provides and encourages moral choice so that, in part, a person can become a moral agent rather than merely someone who does moral acts.

In Part I, we examine how the scope of autonomy is shaped by basic Jewish law axioms. For example, Jewish law assumes that the Pentateuch, also known as the “Written Torah” or “Written Law,” contains words which were communicated to humankind directly by God. Yet, unlike the approaches of some fundamentalist religions, Jewish law does not always construe these divine words literally. In fact, Jewish law authorities openly acknowledge that various Pentateuchal passages, taken by themselves, are incomplete, incomprehensible or at times ostensibly inconsistent. Jewish law assumes that God transmitted to humankind two interrelated bodies of teachings: one, the Pentateuch, was to be written down, and the other, known as the “Oral Torah” or the “Oral Law,” was to be transmitted from Teacher to Student. It is the Oral Torah that clarifies, resolves and supplements the Written Torah. Indeed, because the Oral Torah is necessary to understand the Torah, Jewish legal sources say that “the Oral Torah is the more important of the two.” Throughout this article, unless stated to the contrary, the term “Torah” refers to the Written Torah, the Oral Torah, or both, and the phrase “Torah Law” pertains to the laws that arise from the Torah.

Imagine that you are watching a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on television. Each member of the Committee is asking questions of, and in some cases interrogating, the president's most recent nominee to the United States Supreme Court. She is an accomplished attorney with not only a law degree from an elite institution but also a doctorate in biochemistry and specialization in private practice on issues over which science and law overlap and intersect. For several years she has served on the federal bench on the D.C. circuit and has done so admirably, showing professional competence and jurisprudential insight that has become the envy of her peers, some of whom disagree with her conservative judicial philosophy. Over the years, she has published well-received articles in numerous law reviews and peer-reviewed science publications dealing with issues as wide ranging as the Daubert standard, the reliability of DNA testing in capital murder cases, and whether the Supreme Court's holdings in its reproductive rights cases provide support for a constitutional right to clone oneself.

Human dignity is the recognition and respect of human need, desire and expectation one individual by another. This recognition is indispensable because no human being survives alone: Human dignity creates the foundation of society and civilization. Our knowledge of history suggests that religious ideas have provided this basic foundation of civilization. Describing the first recognized civilization in history one historian says, “Religion permeated Sumerian civic life.” According to another historian, “Religion dominated, suffused, and inspired all features of Near Eastern society—law, kingship, art, and science.” Based on these observations while defining civilization Samuel Huntington asserts, “Religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations.”

In Islam, the Qur’an declares that: “We have bestowed dignity on the progeny of Adam.” The verse then continues to remind the whole of mankind of God's special favor unto them with physical and intellectual abilities, natural resources and with superiority over most other creatures in the world. This dignity is bestowed through God's act of creating Adam and breathing into him His Own Spirit. Since all human beings originated from Adam and his spouse, every single human being possesses this dignity regardless of color, race, religion and tribe. The whole of mankind, as khalīfah (vice-resenf) is responsible for establishing peace on earth through divinely ordained values such as amānah (trust), ‘adālah (justice) and shūra (consultation).

It is a view widely held amongst psychologists that human beings have a basic need to create a positive social identity for themselves, either as individuals or as members of a group. In this regard, choice of dress is likely to be particularly important. A person's clothes can reveal much about their identity, in relation to their gender, class, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs. Yet what an individual wears can also attract great controversy, as evidenced by the fact that, in Europe of late, there have been few issues more controversial than that of religious dress.

Today in towns and cities across Europe a significant proportion of Muslims—in particular Muslim females—have eschewed conventional western clothes in favor of garments (such as veils and headscarves) traditionally associated with Islam. With a new generation of “European Muslims” keen to cultivate a distinct identity for themselves as members of the continent's second largest religion, Islamic dress often has an “emblematic status” as a “powerful and overdetermined marker of difference.” Yet the right to wear religious dress varies significantly in Europe. In some countries there are clear restrictions on what can (or cannot) be worn in public (e.g., France and Turkey), whereas in other parts of the continent (e.g., the U.K.) young people are relatively free to wear the religious dress of their choice. Mindful of this state of affairs, the European Court of Human Rights has chosen to tread warily, letting governments retain considerable discretion in the field of religious dress. Consequently, states enjoy a wide “margin of appreciation” when determining whether their curbs on religious symbols or related garments are compatible with Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The language and ideas of “international human rights” have become seemingly ubiquitous in modern times. Indeed, within the United States, even many prominent evangelical Christian churches and leaders have sparingly started to use the language of human rights despite earlier misgivings. While there has been important academic discussion concerning the foundational role of Christian theology for the modern human rights regime, and literature discussing the acceptance of human rights within Catholic, mainline Protestant, and even Orthodox Christian circles, gaps remain in the literature concerning the relationship between general human rights norms, language, and culture and evangelical Christian theology.

This Article suggests that evangelical Christians have a greater connection to human rights than is often acknowledged (and greater than they often acknowledge themselves). But, it ultimately appears doubtful whether modern evangelical theology is amenable to a robust and deep understanding of human rights. Nonetheless, the recent rise in the number of evangelical non-governmental organizations and the attendant rise in awareness of human rights within evangelical discourse potentially serve as signposts that the uncomfortable dance of evangelicals and the human rights movement may become slightly less awkward over the coming years.

Hindu women's legal right to inherit property has been restricted from the earliest times in Indian culture. In the ancient text Manusmriti, Manu writes: “Her father protects her in childhood, her husband protects her in youth and her sons protect her in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.” However, women were not always excluded from inheriting movable or immovable property from ancestral and marital families. But their proportion of share in the property was far less than that of their male counterparts.

Throughout history, restrictions on Hindu women's property rights have undergone change, and current laws governing these rights are more liberal than those of ancient Hindu society. Patriarchal Hindu society provided women with property known as stridhan (literally, women's property or fortune), and it mainly came from marriage gifts (clothes, jewelry, and in some rare cases, landed properties). However, women were denied property rights to the ancestral or marital landed property, and their right over succession of the landed family property was limited. With the emergence of different schools of Hindu law, the concept of stridhan started expanding its literal and legal meaning, granting women more rights to certain forms of property. Later, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the passage of several pieces of legislation that were intended to remove more of the barriers to full and equal property rights for Hindu women. Most recently, sexual discrimination in Hindu succession rules was mostly discontinued by the recent Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act (2005).