The Indian Constitution guarantees that individuals have the freedom to choose their partners free from state interference. However, the Uttar Pradesh Vidhi Virudh Dharma Samparivartan Pratishedh Adhyadesh, 2020 (Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Law, 2020) prohibits religious conversion to the extent that it assumes all conversions are illegal, which may have a negative impact on interfaith marriages involving consenting adults. The author argues that the provisions of the Uttar Pradesh Ordinance forbidding religious conversion are vague and inadequate for addressing forceful or unlawful conversion for marriages, do not demonstrate any reasonable relation to the object of the legislation, and are constitutionally repugnant. The author concludes that by conferring police powers on state agencies to intervene in interfaith marriages, the Uttar Pradesh Ordinance erodes citizens’ freedom to choose a partner and their individual autonomy, privacy, and personal liberty—rights that are enshrined under India’s constitution.

Over recent decades, several global tech giants have gained enormous power while at the same time generating various disputes with their end-users, local governments, and regulators. We propose that the Jewish concept of covenant can help the above parties, legal scholars, and wider society in addressing this complex legal reality. We present the challenge of disequilibrium between the above four parties against the main points of conflict: the requirement of customer consent; clear contractual provisions upon entry; options for reasonable customer exit; limitations on the platform’s ability to exercise unilateral termination; profile-based discrimination; and liability for mere intermediation. We introduce the biblical concept of covenant, and we review its unfolding in Jewish tradition. Further, we conceptualize three main covenantal principles: (1) responsibility—God and humans are both conceived as moral agents; (2) reciprocity—God as a caring law giver, open to human appeals; and (3) reasonability—divine instruction as initially intelligible. We demonstrate how the latter principle of explainability is exercised in the biblical law narratives and how the story of Balaam stresses the significance of moral agency that cannot hide behind “mere intermediary” claims. In light of this analysis, we revisit the relationship between tech giants and tech users to demonstrate how covenantality offers novel ways to conceptualize the noted conflicts between the parties.

The following essays are part of a collaboration between the Journal of Law and Religion and Political Theology. Editors from both journals selected the two texts interrogated and interpreted here—James Baldwin’s essay “Equal in Paris” and the United States Supreme Court decision in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). The purpose of the collaboration was twofold. The first purpose was to see what new interpretations arise when scholars working primarily in law read the essay by Baldwin, who has been a touchstone in much contemporary Black theology, and when scholars working in religious studies read the legal decision in Wong Kim Ark, a case in which the Supreme Court extended citizenship to the child of Chinese immigrants who conceived and bore him on American soil. The second purpose was to divide publication between the journals, with each journal publishing three of the six essays, with a view to building bridges between readers of each journal over a topic at the intersection of both law and political theology.

This essay examines the interplay between law, Christianity, and oppression in the thought of James Baldwin. This essay begins its inquiry from Baldwin’s own essay, Equal in Paris, and expands out to his broader writing. The essay makes four contributions. First, it shows that Equal in Paris presents a view of law and Christianity as simultaneously serving as instruments and sources of hypocrisy and injustice while representing critically important, if difficult to achieve, standards of justice and love. Second, the essay shows that for Baldwin avoidance and denial of collective moral failure underlies the hypocritical use of law and Christianity to perpetrate injustice rather than justice. Third, the essay reveals that Baldwin would see current legislative bans of critical race theory as a means of avoidance and denial of collective moral failure. Moreover, from a Baldwinian perspective, the maintenance of innocence through bans on critical race theory is a “crime” that typifies the problem at the root of racial oppression in America, which is the refusal to come to terms with the reality of white supremacy. Fourth, while agreeing with scholars who find significant overlap between Baldwin’s approach to law and critical race theory, the essay concludes that Baldwin’s work suggests that critical race theory’s neglect of love constitutes a critical shortcoming for critical race theory’s anti-subordinationist agenda.

This essay explores judicial responses to legal restrictions on worship during the COVID-19 pandemic and draws two lessons, one comparative and one relating specifically to U.S. law. As a comparative matter, courts across the globe have approached the problem in essentially the same way, through intuition and balancing. This has been the case regardless of what formal test applies, the proportionality test outside the United States, which expressly calls for judges to weigh the relative costs and benefits of a restriction, or the Employment Division v. Smith test inside the United States, which rejects judicial line-drawing and balancing in favor of predictable results. Judges have reached different conclusions about the legality of restrictions, of course, but doctrinal nuances have made little apparent difference. With respect to the United States specifically, the pandemic has revealed deep divisions about religion and religious freedom, among other things—divisions that have inevitably influenced judicial attitudes toward restrictions on worship. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed a cultural and political rift that makes consensual resolution of conflicts over religious freedom problematic, and perhaps impossible, even during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Although diverging influences have always characterized the relation between religion and democracy, in Italy, tensions arising from these divergences are especially exacerbated by the country’s current religious diversity and plurality, and they are magnified when combined with chronic emergencies such as immigration and international terrorism. These critical factors complicate the application of freedom of religion and the supreme principle of secularism (principio supremo di laicità), which are essential parts of the Italian legal system. This article analyzes these aspects of the law by considering the relation between Islamic communities and the state. In particular, the article focuses on both endogenous influences (Italy’s traditional system of state-church relationship) and exogenous influences (immigration and international terrorism). These factors muddle the interpretation of constitutional rights, including the right of Muslims and Islamic groups to be equal and equally free before the law.

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019) was one of Germany’s foremost postwar legal scholars. He coined or popularized key terms and ideas that have left their mark on postwar German political debate to an extent matched by only few, from the chain of legitimation to the concept of the constitution as an ordering frame, the importance of the idea of subsidiarity in the European Union’s political competency, and his insistence that society must continuously work toward agreement on the things that cannot be voted on: the ultimate agreements in society that lie beyond the ballot box. Böckenförde was a lifelong commentator on Catholic affairs in Germany and involved in several important inner-Catholic reform initiatives. At the age of thirty-one, he became known to a wider German public with an article that presented a critical historical appraisal of the role of the Catholic Church under National Socialism. While still a postdoc, he co-authored a widely publicized critique of Jesuit Gustav Gundlach’s justification on theological grounds of a war of nuclear deterrence. In 1968, he was the first to publish a German edition of De Libertate Religiosa, the final declaration of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), and provided an authoritative commentary.

This essay introduces the roundtable, “John R. Lewis's Legacies in Law and Religion.” A civil rights icon and long-standing US congressman representing Georgia's Fifth Congressional District, Lewis was often described as the moral conscience of the US Congress and the nation. The essays in this roundtable explore the many facets of Lewis's moral leadership, with particular attention to his influence on law and religion. This roundtable is a testament to what it means to speak up, speak out, and be bold in defense of justice.

James Baldwin’s autobiographical essay “Equal in Paris” is a perceptive and often amusing account of the American writer’s first visit to Paris. An aspiring novelist who left America in rage over his experience of the country’s injustice and contempt toward Black Americans, Baldwin is acutely aware of racial prejudice in majority white societies. He tells of his experience of staying in a dilapidated hotel, of being wrongly accused of theft and then imprisoned in a Paris jail for more than a week over Christmas. Baldwin’s astute observations of Parisian life and its institutions, show how as a Black American, he struggles to understand this new cultural environment which like most Western societies, has its own form of racism. But this is also a story of an artist’s search for a new intellectual home where he can breathe freely and write. His new friendships with other artists and observations about cosmopolitan European life, allow him to assess what it means to be an American in Paris. This includes exploring those social attitudes that divide America and Europe and those that are universal.

This essay analyzes one of James Baldwin’s least commented-upon essays, “Equal in Paris,” through the lens of current debates about transatlantic differences regarding race, equality, and citizenship. In his essay, Baldwin narrates how he was imprisoned in Paris for several days a year after his arrival in France. Baldwin constructs his essay not as a political manifesto about race, citizenship, and equality. Rather, through a powerful and cinematographic description, he leads the reader to share the narrator’s distressing experience of disjunction and terror he had while in prison. This literary choice can be understood in the context of Baldwin’s rejection of theologies of damnation and redemption that, according to him, motivate protest writings.

According to Böckenförde’s interpretation in his famous essay “The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization” (1967), in the formation of modern statehood religious freedom and, more generally, freedom of conscience played a central role. It was “for love of such freedom” that the modern state set inviolable limits on the exercise of its own coercive force vis-à-vis citizens relying on its protection. Nobody may be forced through the coercive tools of political power to hold true something that they do not believe. This dynamic of freedom is further taken up in Böckenförde’s analysis of church history and theological traditions, as this essay demonstrates. The conception of religious freedom as a right of the human person, contained in the Second Vatican Council declaration Dignitatis Humanae, is a real “Copernican turn.” It represents a true revolution in Catholic interpretation of democracy, public ethos, and natural law, which aims at reconciling modern freedom, democracy, and religion through a revised doctrine of the common good.

This essay examines the life and leadership of the late congressman John Lewis as it illustrates key dimensions of American history, including slavery, the exploitative sharecropping economy, the protests of the Civil Rights Movement and student activism. This embodiment of the American experience rendered him a unique national leader and conscience of the Congress. Lewis is presented as fulfilling key rhetorical dimensions of the public intellectual as moralist for the nation.

This essay shows how three institutions—family, religion, and education—coalesced to shape the moral life of John Lewis. Lewis was born into a very religious, though uneducated, family who wished to see their son receive the education they were denied. The young Lewis took their zeal for education and religion into seminary and later college. It was in college that Lewis developed an intolerance for discrimination and came to champion the civil and human rights of all individuals. His call of conscience would not condone the suffering and abuse being generated by a segregated society. This passion for human rights led to his rising into prominence in the political arena, where many referred to him as the “conscience of the nation.”

In comparing the works of two major Catholic thinkers, John Courtney Murray (1904–1967) and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019), one finds an example of the divergences between European-continental Catholic and US Catholic concepts of the state and society. This divergence has become more evident in the context of the rise of American Catholics in politics and in the context of the crisis of the post–World War II liberal political order, but they have been at the heart of different Catholic intellectual traditions for quite some time. A comparative analysis of Murray and Böckenförde helps to explain the role of US Catholicism in the crisis of American democracy and the complexity of the reception of Vatican II in political theology in different Catholic Churches around the world.