Over the past two decades a number of Israeli institutions of higher education have opened gender-segregated programs for the ultra-Orthodox, or haredim. The growth of these programs has generated an intense debate in Israel, reflected throughout Israeli media and in several appeals to Israel's Supreme Court. The issues raised concerning gender-segregated higher education reflect an overarching inquiry that is of great interest to multicultural theoreticians: the relationship of liberal democracies to their illiberal minorities. Multicultural theoreticians agree that healthy democracies must tolerate some illiberal practices while acknowledging that not every illiberal practice can be tolerated. In the case at hand, the essay addresses the question: can a liberal democracy tolerate gender-segregated higher education? Using work by Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, John Inazu, and others, the essay reviews the arguments for and against gender segregation in higher education for Israeli haredim. The essay explores the limits of toleration of illiberal cultures within liberal democratic societies and finds crucial the right to exit such a culture—a right whose viability is dependent upon adequate education. The essay concludes by discussing the multiculturalism organization development model and what has been termed the manyness and messiness of multiculturalism.

What happened to biblical law when transferred into late antique Christianity? How can answering this question provide a paradigm that helps us understand the rise and development of late antique Christian legal traditions? In the first centuries of the Common Era, the Christian legal tradition began to evolve in Roman, Greek, rabbinic, and biblical contexts. Focusing on the biblical institution of levirate marriage, this article offers a paradigm that elucidates how Christians might have adopted, adapted, and sometimes rejected their legal heritage; it may illuminate the overall development of Christian legal discourse. Following a short survey of the rabbinic adaptation of biblical levirate marriage and the Roman and Christian rulings regarding this practice, I analyze the Christian exegetical and theological discourse on levirate marriage, focusing on the acceptance or rejection of levirate marriage as a whole and adaptations to the biblical institution. This analysis demonstrates the disparity between the rabbinic discourse, the Christian and Roman rulings, and the theological and exegetical discourse. It shows how Christians remodeled their biblical heritage according to Greek and Roman legal concepts, namely the Roman adoption and the Greek epiklerate, and treated it as part of inheritance law and child-parent relationships, whereas the rabbis used different adaptations and treated it as part of matrimonial law and sexual relationships. This discussion therefore recontextualizes the legal discourse, positioning the Christian approach to levirate marriage as a complex case of legal transplant and adaptation of a legal heritage.

Napoleon's most famous innovation in his legendary military career was the use of the daunting Grande Armée with an emphasis on speed, maneuverability, and maintaining the offensive. Yet Napoleon understood that while skirmishes were won or lost on the battlefield, the real war lay in public perception. To that end, Napoleon used art and cultural treasures as part of his arsenal in order to create the perception of victory, regardless of the outcome of any particular campaign. Examining contemporary French artistic representations of Napoleon granting freedom of worship to religious groups, this article analyzes artwork as a tool for fashioning and communicating legal narrative. Popular visual arts are mined for meaning, painting a portrait of the legal and cultural setting of these creative works. The partisan artwork demonstrates how Napoleon's artists depicted freedom of worship as the freedom—granted to all faiths—to worship Napoleon. It is noted that Jews feature disproportionately in the Empire period's depictions of freedom of worship. This is surprising, as the Jewish community was numerically insignificant and hardly influential in Napoleon's realm. This article argues that in addition to broadcasting religious tolerance, Napoleonic artwork used Jews and symbols like Moses and tablets of law to fashion a narrative of law that foregrounded the legal legitimacy of Napoleon's rule: Napoleon's regime is legally just; the enlightened ruler affords rights and liberties to all his subjects; divine Napoleon is the new lawgiver.

Religious accommodation analysis often takes the form of a tripartite test. One of the factors in such a test is the presence of burden, the current judicial understandings of which have been inadequate to capture a wide range of impact that government regulations have on the individual or community practice of religion. This article considers and compares the jurisprudence of the high courts of the United States and Canada and the European Court of Human Rights and argues for an expansive understanding of the burden requirement in the evaluation of religious accommodation claims, namely to consider burden as (1) coercion, (2) impact, and (3) ratification. I argue that it is imperative to acknowledge different kinds of burden before proceeding to determine its gravity. This approach takes religion more seriously than prevailing approaches and provides for a more equitable distribution of the burden of proof in religious accommodation claims.

The legal treatises of ancient India, called Dharmaśāstras, are often read as records of the initial emergence of law from religion in South Asia. The Dharmaśāstras teach the dharma, or “sacred duty,” of different members of society. It is one of the dharmas of the king to adjudicate disputes that come before his courts, and it is widely accepted that a need to articulate the king's dharma led the composers of the Dharmaśāstras over time to fashion rules for state courts, a body of law called vyavahāra. Scholars such as Henry Sumner Maine and Max Weber saw in the Dharmaśāstras evidence of the disentanglement and rationalization of law, respectively. A close examination of our sources, however, shows that the law of royal courts emerged not within the Dharmaśāstra tradition, but within an adjacent and decidedly more secular tradition of statecraft. It was gradually absorbed into Dharmaśāstra texts, where it was reconfigured as sacred duty and its historical origins were obscured. This article argues that the early history of state law in India is best described, therefore, not as a transition from dharma to law, but as a transition from law to dharma.

Critiques of animal sacrifice in India have become increasingly strident over the past fifteen years. In the state of West Bengal, many of these critiques center on Kālīghāṭ, a landmark Hindu pilgrimage site in Kolkata where goats are sacrificed daily to the goddess Kālī. However, while similar critiques of this practice have resulted in many Indian states pushing to ban it—or enforce previous bans of it—no such legal action has been issued in West Bengal. Instead, in 2006, the Calcutta High Court ruled that this practice must be visually concealed at Kālīghāṭ. Drawing on modernist notions of cleanliness and public space, the bench argued that the blood and offal produced by this practice creates an inappropriate visual experience for visitors at a major pilgrimage and tourist site in this city. In the act of concealing sacrifice, the Calcutta High Court follows suit with courts across India in deeming the practice unmodern. Yet the Court's orders are defied daily by practitioners at Kālīghāṭ who seek physical and visual access to sacrificed animals and their blood. They believe Kālī desires that blood, and bestows her power and blessings through it. Fault lines in Hindu conceptions of power are dramatized here. The power of the courts is pitted against the power of the gods as Hindus debate the potency, necessity, and modernity of this practice.

Reproductive politics is the locus classicus for studying the entanglement of religion with politics and lawmaking processes in the Philippines. Although 25 percent of the total population participates in the Pentecostal movement, there is virtually no comprehensive work that studies this movement's attitudes about reproductive health. In this article I analyze Pentecostals’ attitude on reproductive health vis-à-vis recent studies that depict the movement as religious populism. I investigate the interests and exclusions that Pentecostals’ keywords and narratives, as well as recent scholarship on Pentecostalism, conceal. I first provide a genealogical reconstruction of the debate on reproductive health in the Philippines. Second, I provide an overview of the religious landscape and discuss Pentecostal's attitudes toward reproductive health while demonstrating that their rhetorical positions cannot be understood apart from hegemonic struggles and their entanglement with local and global discourse. Third, I draw theoretical and methodological implications for the study of Pentecostalism, politics, and lawmaking processes in the Philippines. Finally, I conclude by showing the relationship between Pentecostalism in the Philippines and the broader study of religion and politics, including making and implementing law.

This article focuses on the representations and perceptions of Muslim Palestinian women as encapsulated by early Israeli legislation. The analysis is based on a close reading of the negotiations and discussions leading up to the criminalization of bigamy by the Israeli state and, in particular, those principal discussions surrounding the legislation of the Women's Equal Rights Law of 1951. Primary materials from the Israeli State Archives are used to reconstruct the debates in the Knesset, assess the legislation's intended effects on the Muslim Palestinian family, and trace the opposition to it fielded by the Palestinian religious leadership. The legislative process is dissected to expose the implicit and explicit patriarchal and nationalized underpinnings of the image of the “ideal family” fashioned by Israeli legislators. Despite their national divide, I argue, both the Israeli Knesset and the Muslim community leadership articulated women's roles in similarly distinctive national-patriarchal hues.

John Milbank's critique of the secular as a violent distortion of Christian theology is well established. Less clear is how Milbank's framework might bear upon secular liberalism as it specifically relates to liberal ideas of religious freedom and public or secular reasons in political contexts. This is especially worthy of investigation since “religious freedom” is part of the liberal framework Milbank so stridently critiques. This article attempts to reconcile Milbank's theological critique of secular liberalism with the idea of religious freedom by applying Milbank's theology and the law of love to liberal notions of public discourse for the purpose of redeeming and transforming that discourse. This redeemed “liberalism” provides a framework for persuasion to the Good by recognizing that all public positions (including secularism) are ultimately faith positions, and advocates a discourse governed by the law of love to produce genuine religious freedom that paradoxically transcends and fulfils the liberal ideals that secular liberalism proclaims but can never attain.

This article examines legislative changes related to abortion regulation in Australia that create obligations of medical referral on practitioners who have a conscientious objection to abortion. Despite a significant Australian history of accepting secularized conscience claims, particularly in the field of military conscription, the limitation of conscience claims about abortion can be traced to a failure to appreciate the significant secular arguments that can be made to support such claims. We draw on arguments of plurality and pragmatism as capable of providing a firm foundation for legislative protections of freedom of conscience in the case of medical referral for abortion. These justifications are not dependent on religious grounds, and therefore they have the potential to be relevant and persuasive in a secular society such as Australia. Acceptance of a pluralistic argument in favor of freedom of conscience is a powerful commitment to the creation of a society that values human autonomy and a diversity of opinion. It sits comfortably with the democratic values that are enshrined in the Australian political system and institutions. It avoids the potential damage to the individual that may be wrought when conscience is overridden by state compulsion.

This article surveys the evolution of the Catholic Church's official response to same-sex relations over the last two centuries. While the church has not altered its condemnation of same-sex relations, the justifications it offers for this negative judgment have shifted substantially, and they have moved, especially recently, in a direction that makes possible the acceptance of same-sex relations at some future—and perhaps not too-distant—date. This article explores the manualist tradition of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries; twentieth-century developments in canon law; and the period of retrenchment and reaction under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Its final section looks at developments under Pope Francis. It closes by considering the way the church's teaching shifted over the course of its history—penance and the forgiveness of sins; anti-Semitism; and the sin against natural-law of taking interest on a loan (usury). It proposes that we might witness the church undergo a similar shift on same-sex relations.

Filiation among Muslims in India is governed by Muslim personal law, a largely uncodified corpus of key Islamic legal treatises that has subsequently been interpreted and applied through the Common Law frame of British colonial courts and the post-Independence Indian judicial system by virtue of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937. Muslim personal law recognizes only legitimate filiation resulting from a valid or irregular marriage, barring illegitimate children from maintenance and intestate succession and prohibiting adoption. However, a number of legislative enactments have modified key aspects of the law of filiation among Muslims: shifting the presumption of legitimacy arising from a valid marriage to the time of the wedding, rather than the time of conception; invalidating the doctrine of dormant fetus; and lifting certain disabilities incurred from illegitimacy. Further, although adoption based on customary law is somewhat common in India and has been recognized by courts, its effect among Muslims has tended only to lift the bar to paternal succession and seldom creates filiation with the adoptive family. Notwithstanding, following the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments, an optional secular legal framework for adoption is now available to Muslim prospective parents. The procedure set forth by the Act is nonetheless unwieldly and implementation faces the very practical difficulties of the state in managing and protecting the vast number of destitute and abandoned children in India, for the most part with an unknown filiation.

This article examines the cases of children born out of wedlock and adopted children with the aim of depicting the mechanisms through which the concepts of biological fatherhood, derived from the human-rights framework, and adoption, derived from the customary law framework, have been adopted into Indonesian Islamic family law. We argue that the introduction of external concepts into family law pertaining to Muslims requires an adaptation process in which the relation between these external concepts and core Islamic family law concepts is determined. In the case of children born out of wedlock, this adaptation to core Islamic norms means that biological fatherhood does not lead to a full legal father-child relationship, despite a 2012 Constitutional Court ruling establishing that children born out of wedlock have a civil relationship with their biological father. In the case of adoption, it means that there is no full adoption, despite recognition of customary adoptions under Indonesian law. We argue that in a context of strong support for a religion-based family law, reforms tend to take the form of conditions or exceptions to core religious concepts, as replacing these concepts altogether would be perceived as jeopardizing the religious character of the law. While attempts to replace core Islamic family law concepts will inevitably meet strong resistance, there is much more tolerance for introducing family law reforms that aim at changing the way that Islamic concepts are applied in practice.