Former President Carter's Presidential Proclamation ordering the resumption of registration for a possible draft provoked once again a question that has recurred throughout the history of the American republic: what right, if any, do persons conscientiously unable to participate in a military enterprise hav to be exempted from laws that would otherwise requir them to do so?

The question, at its profoundest level, touches on difficult issues of political and legal philosophy. On the one hand, war is the ultima ratio regnum. The presumption is that a nation will not mobilize its people for military effort unless vital interests are at stake and that the people are bound to support that effort with their energies and lives.

The organization of a Section on Law and Religion in 1976 by the Association of American Law Schools (after Watergate) was followed in 1977 by the incorporation of the Council on Religion and Law. My participation in both led to the study of theology and especially to the question, what, if anything, can a legal scholar, particularly one specialized in penal law and the philosophy of law, contribute to the literature on the interrelations of law and religion? In the English-speaking world not many legal scholars have written on this subject, and none, to my knowledge, on the interrelationship of religion and modern criminal law. I here confine my discussion to the Bible and, more particularly, to some of the writing on atonement by Christian theologians.

The central focus of Christianity is on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the relevant theme, originating in the Old Testament and frequently addressed in the New Testament, is that of atonement. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament accept and emphasize the vicarious significance of the sacrifice—the lamb in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament. The one sacrificed takes on itself or himself the sins of Israel or the sins of all mankind. Likewise, the sacrifice frees all Israel or all mankind from sin, and the consequence is reconciliation with God.

The lawyer in American law is an integral and essential part of the legal system. At the inception of this nation, the lawyer's role received official sanction by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to assistance of counsel “in all criminal proceedings.”

In Jewish law, by contrast, we find no such guarantee regarding the right to counsel. On the contrary, the lawyer was a concession, forced upon the Jewish legal system by certain exigencies. At no time was the lawyer viewed as essential to the adjudicative process. If anything, the lawyer was formerly seen as an obstacle to ascertaining truth. Nonetheless, the personage of the lawyer has today become an accepted feature of the Jewish legal world.

As in other systems, the lawyer in Jewish law plays primarily two roles, that of advocate and that of legal consultant. In this essay, I will highlight the various aspects of these roles, analyzing the function filled by the legal profession within Jewish law.

Soon after Gotama the Buddha Sakyamuni obtained his Enlightenment in 531 B.C. he established the basis of a self-governing Religious Order (Sangha). The rules of this community (Vinaya) were framed and promulgated by the Buddha himself.

It is the general belief that the Buddha was concerned solely with establishing a moral and spiritual teaching and that he was not law-minded. For instance, T. W. Rhys Davids maintains that:

Contrary to this view, I have argued that the Vinaya was a monastic code which in its entirety amounted to a legal system. In this article, I wish to consider the Buddha's relationship to law and law-making by examining the nature of his authority and how his recommendations were elevated into precepts. I shall argue that the Buddha legislated by way of precepts, that he was not a judge, as some scholars contend, and that his precepts rarely took the form of a dialogue in which a question of conduct is posed and a precept is uttered in response (Responsa).

By the time the correspondence between Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was underway, both men were well established in their respective careers. Frankfurter, coming from a prestigious post at the Harvard Law School, took the oath of office as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on January 30, 1939. Niebuhr, occupying the Chair of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, had recently returned from Edinburgh where he had delivered the highly regarded Gifford Lectures soon to be published in two significant volumes, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-1943).

During the period of their correspondence Frankfurter emerged as a major voice in American jurisprudence and came to fulfill the prognostication of Harold Ickes who once told Franklin Roosevelt; “If you appoint Frankfurter, his ability and learning are such that he will dominate the Supreme Court for fifteen or twenty years to come.” Niebuhr, meanwhile, experienced a meteoric rise to prominence in both theological and political circles and stood as one of the towering figures in American life. His contributions to American intellectual history were vast and varied, making him both the most important theologian in the American tradition since Jonathan Edwards, and, in the words of Hans Morgenthau, “the greatest living political philosopher of America, perhaps the only creative political philosopher since Calhoun.”