Over the past four hundred years, international law has increasingly distanced itself from the theological discourse that was once at its core. Today there is some evidence of a renewed conversation between international lawyers and those with theological expertise or concerns. But that conversation is far from advanced. With notable exceptions, theologians, within the Christian tradition at least, have implicitly heeded Albert Gentili's late 16th century warning—“Let the theologians keep silence about a matter which is outside of their province”—to the point of letting international law go its own way. At least the relationship of theology to international law is not a frequent topic at meetings of theologians, or of the books and articles which they write. As for the manner in which international law treats religion and the theological discourse that it spawns, the current vice president of the International Court of Justice remarks that, “in the twentieth century, international law has so far distanced itself from religion that the latter receives scarcely a mention in the standard treatises.” Gone are the days when those who shaped modern international law, such as Suarez and Vitoria, were also highly trained theologians. Thus from the sides of both theology and international law, there is a long way to go if we are to get back to—and move beyond—the way things once were.

This essay must begin with a point of clarification that is critical for those unfamiliar with Islam. While it is my belief that the view I present represents an Islamic position on Affirmative Action, I make no claim to represent the Islamic position. For far from constituting a monolith, as American public perception has it, the Muslim population in the United States is a heterogeneous amalgamation of somewhere around six million people. And while it is true that as Muslims—immigrant and native-born—they share a common scriptural heritage and, to a significantly lesser extent, a common intellectual one, it is also true that their lives, and hence their priorities and thinking, are informed by historical, cultural, political and social realities that are in many instances unrelated to each other and in some instances diametrically opposed. On such recognition, it should not stretch credulity to imagine a Muslim adopting a position on a topic like Affirmative Action that is, on the one hand, diametrically opposed to my own yet, on the other hand—at least prima facie—equally justified in its claim to be Islamic. In the present atmosphere, where Western ignorance and bias only adds to the tendency among Muslims to react in ways that promote rather than discourage stereotyping and essentialist readings of Islam, it would seem only fitting to insist that before we rush to catalogue the Islamic position on a matter like Affirmative Action, we first hear from a lot more voices from within the Muslim community.

The historic relationship between Christianity and human rights is an ambiguous one. For hundreds of years the Christian Church actively promoted religious intolerance and persecuted those who failed to accept its moral values and customs. Many of these values and practices are today rejected as contrary to a human rights culture and moral decency. Max Stackhouse argues that while “[t]he deep roots of human rights ideals are rooted nowhere else than in the biblical tradition,” these values “remained a minority tradition (within the Church) for centuries.” James Woods, in turn, argues that “religion and freedom have not been natural allies.”

The affirmation of human rights emerged painfully and belatedly in the Christian Church. The “deep biblical roots of human rights ideals” have, however, periodically been acknowledged and retrieved throughout the history of the church in an attempt to correct wrongs, repudiate theological support for abuses, and to pursue a more humane society. The history of the emergence of human rights within the Western Christian tradition, recognises that religions develop in interaction with other social and cultural forces in society. I argue in what follows that the relationship between Christianity and the human rights tradition can only enrich society to the extent that the relationship is sustained by mutual critique and correction.

One of the more beautiful and impressive structures in Washington, D.C., is the neo-classical Supreme Court building, located just east of the Capitol. Upon entering the marble columned courtroom, a hallowed place where notions of law and justice have been defined for more than sixty years, one's eyes are inevitably drawn to the frieze that borders the ceiling some fifty feet above. Encircling the courtroom from a lofty perch, as if symbolizing a heavenly host, are the carved images of eighteen great law-givers, ranging from Hammurabi and Justinian to Blackstone. In the very center of the relief, high over the seat of the Chief Justice, is a symbolic figure balancing a rounded tablet containing ten Roman numerals. The image is as unmistakable as the message it portrays: the Ten Commandments, a religious document central to Jewish and Christian faiths, is being offered as a primary source of American law.

It is axiomatic that many of the principles contained in the Ten Commandments are fundamental to the Western legal tradition. Prohibitions on murder, theft, and perjury are found in nearly every legal code. Notions of respect for one's parents and admonitions against adultery are also implicit, if not explicit, in the quasi-legal realm of normative rules that order many societies. Few people, if any, would dispute that the Ten Commandments—and its parallels from other ancient cultures—as well as other directives contained in the Pentateuch of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, inform our notions of right and wrong and, as such, have influenced the development of Western law of which the American legal system is part.

Were the exhortation to forebear conduct toward others that is hurtful to oneself not so often ignored in real life, its reiteration here would be wearisome. But phrased as Hillel—or as Matthew—does, it remains mostly an aspiration. In this essay, I place the prescription front and center by asking what it might mean, even in theory, to urge love for one's neighbors as for oneself in a pluralist, liberal democratic society. Is it even theoretically possible to achieve? Does it matter? Could it be realized if we treat everyone in exactly same way, and do so from within the same internally constructed frameworks that we bring to the rest of the world? Such a conclusion hardly seems likely, if love of one's neighbor contains a universal prescription for peaceful co-existence; we seem ill-prepared as a public to facilitate the norm. Hillel's vision, rooted in Leviticus, thus partakes of both the trivial and the majestic: of the trivial because it appears as a vaguely-worded, uselessly abstract appeal devoid of substance; but at the same time there's deceptive majesty because the genuine enduring sovereignty of the idea, though often heavily weighed down by the earth's sometimes dreary trappings, is undeniable.

The Catholic Church claims a wide authority to make pronouncements on faith and morals, and have them respected by members of the church. The nature and extent of the respect to be accorded them is subject to considerable debate, some of it both extensive and acrimonious. It is claimed, to be sure, that certain pronouncements are infallible; if so, they are obviously beyond debate. But for most pronouncements no such claim is made. Furthermore, the question whether a given pronouncement is infallible or not is itself debatable, and can generally not be infallibly resolved.

We are confronted, therefore, with an array of assertions of varying provenance to which we are expected to give some measure of credence, even though we have no guarantee that they are true, or even that their authors are particularly well-informed. They take their authority from that of the church, which in its corporate capacity is the repository of God's Revelation, and the beneficiary of His guidance.

In this article I argue that an accommodationist approach to Church-State relations provides the most appropriate interpretation of the Irish Constitution. This accommodationist interpretation is however incompatible with Ireland's system of almost exclusively denominational education, in which denominational schools of all the Churches are funded.

To present all the details of this argument requires a lengthy, at times detailed, at other times an only too brief summary of features of Irish law and the educational establishment. The key points to bear in mind during this presentation are the following.

The schools which educate most children until the age of 18 are usually owned by different religious bodies, and have a particular denominational ethos. In Ireland we term these “denominational” schools. Only a small number of schools are multi-denominational or non-denominational. All schools,provided they have adequate local support, and adhere to national curricula and standards, receive State funding on a non-discriminatory basis. Even though they are owned by private bodies, there is massive State involvement. The State pays for almost all of the current running costs of these schools, and makes a significant contribution to the capital costs. The State also plays a major role in designing curricula and syllabi for the courses.

This educational system, which has developed along these lines ever since 1831, has only recently come under sustained legal scrutiny. The 1937 Irish Constitution provides for judicial review and our judges have often been active in using constitutional rights and principles to correct public policy, which strays from the constitutional path. However it offers no clear answer to the obvious moral issues raised by the educational system: the text recognises the right to education, the right to religious freedom, the principle of non-endowment of religion. However it also endorses state deference to parental wishes in the field of education, and explicitly sanctions state aid for denominational schools.

As a “liberal natural lawyer,” I take a good amount of ribbing from colleagues in the legal academy. I'm told my self-description is either an oxymoron or just my own “language game.” But from such a perspective, I was recently provoked to examine the post-modern enterprise by an exchange I had with an eminent Jesuit philosopher who was giving an address at a local Catholic seminary on some conflicting currents in neoscholastic philosophy.

In his formal remarks, the renowned Thomist took a rather hard swipe at post-modernism, singling out Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty for special scorn. Afterwards, in a personal chat, I asked him what he found so troubling about the outlooks of those influential, contemporary thinkers. He gave the succinct response that I should have expected from such an erudite Aristotelian. “People like Focault and Rorty,” he said “have destroyed the sense of wonder.”

Given the gentleman's stature, I took his criticism quite seriously. However I'd like to offer a broader reading of those two most notable post-moderns-commending them for the valid and important contributions they've made. But I'd also like to point out where they come up short and may even be searching themselves for something beyond the conventional understandings of their works.

Foucalt and Rorty represent two quite different strains of post-modernism. Foucault is the pre-eminent French post-structuralist while Rorty, an American, is often reviled by such radicals as a decadent moderate and an apologist for the North Atlantic bourgeoisie.

It is often noted that the term “ts'daqah” is derived from the Hebrew word for “justice.” However, this observation is rarely accompanied by a historically valid definition of the sort of justice assumed to inform Jewish sources on the issue. The dichotomizing of “ts'daqah” and “charity,” commonly offered in place of such a definition, oversimplifies the complex connotations of both terms. The observation that “justice” is “obligatory” or “compulsory,” whereas “charity” is a voluntary act of love, also falls short. It is true that halakhah tends to be expressed in terms of obligations rather than rights, and that this tendency has played a major role in shaping rabbinic sources on support of the poor. As Moshe Silberg notes in the course of his analysis of the moral underpinnings of Jewish law, “[the halakbah] is not primarily concerned with the indebtedness to the claimant, but with the obligation to the debtor, with his religio-moral obligation … and it is only as though in a side effect, as a secondary result of the process, does the claimant receive his money.” Nevertheless, “obligatory giving” is by itself an incomplete characterization of the conceptual structure of ts'daqah.

Moreover, beyond these theoretical considerations, confusion concerning the meaning of ts'daqah also has practical implications. The term is frequently misapplied by Jews to describe any contribution to a not-for-profit organization (excluding taxes), regardless of how the contribution is actually used. Jewish communal fund-raisers regularly refer to contributions to sundry funds and projects as ts'daqah, whether the ultimate destination of a contribution is assistance to poor people, construction of a new swimming pool at a Jewish community center, or the salary of a fund administrator.

The present article offers a corpus-based analysis of the diachronic development of the usage profiles of three adverbial non-finite clauses in Modern English: the free adjunct, the verbal gerund and the absolute construction. By treating present-participial adverbial clauses and adverbial gerunds as part of a single adverbial ing-clause network, this article sheds new light on the different semantic and functional-pragmatic factors motivating the formal variation within the ing-clause network. By means of two mixed-model logistic regression analyses, we determine the relative impact of the independent variables of adverbial semantics, position, degree of coreference and length on the language user's choice in (i) whether or not to include augmentation (syndesis) and (ii) whether or not to include an overt subject in the adverbial ing-clause. The resulting picture is one of an emerging adverbial ing-clause network in which the internal variation is determined by principles of processing complexity.

In this article the author isolates an anecdote from Roland Huntford's account of the Scott and Amundsen expeditions’ meeting on 4 February 1911 at Framheim, the Norwegian base in the Bay of Whales. In this anecdote, Lieutenant Victor Campbell allegedly told Roald Amundsen that a British motor sledge was ‘already on terra firma’, which consequently led Amundsen to worry that a British motor-sledge had already travelled across the Great Ice Barrier to reach the Beardmore Glacier. The author demonstrates the primary evidence that indicates that this anecdote is unrealistic: Amundsen's journal further indicates that he did not consider Scott's vehicles a threat. This ‘terra firma’ myth has skewed our modern understanding of events, ascribing to Amundsen an erroneous motivation (a supposed fear of the British motor sledges) to explain and excuse his too-early start for the south pole in September 1911, which was an error that nearly led to a Norwegian death (that of Lieutenant Kristian Prestrud). In reality, fear of Scott's motor sledges was not the reason for Amundsen's ‘false start’. This article concludes with a discussion on the hazards of attributing ‘hidden motivations’ to historical figures without citation of primary evidence, and recommends that Huntford include clearly-cited references and endnotes for the next edition of his joint biography of Scott and Amundsen, in keeping with modern standards of scholarship.

The precise length of territorial waters, the swath of sea along the coast over which a state extended sovereign control, remained an object of debate during the seventeenth century. Some authors still adhered to the 100-mile boundary established by medieval glossators, whereas others embraced the so-called cannon-shot rule that set the limit to the reach of a shot fired from the land. But no one disputed the existence of territorial waters. Even Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), then Europe's greatest champion of the freedom of the sea, followed Roman law in conceding that a state could exert its sovereignty over littoral waters or inlets in a shoreline (diverticula maris). This rare point of agreement between theorists of mare liberum (the free sea) and defenders of mare clausum (the closed sea) did not eliminate all controversies concerning the governance of coastal waters. Particularly contentious were domestic and international disputes over the property rights on the cargo of sunken ships. What sources of law governed the assignment of ownership of salvaged wreckages? Who was entitled to compensation for assisting in the recovery efforts? And how did legal claims square with political maneuvering in domestic and interstate disputes over wreckages?

It is with great regret that we announce the death of one of our associate Editors, David Trotter, on 24 August 2015. Professor and Department Head at Aberystwyth University (UK) since 1993, David was a valued colleague who served on the board of the Journal of French Language Studies for 14 years. His fellow editors will deeply miss his contributions to a collegial working environment and his diligence in ensuring the high standards of the journal from an editorial perspective. A full obituary will appear in a future issue of the journal.

In this paper I argue that a subpattern of Irish plural allomorphy should be analyzed as output optimizing in character. Specifically, I claim that stress-sensitive alternations between the plural suffixes -(e)anna and -(e)acha are conditioned by constraints on metrical well-formedness. This analysis connects with independent facts about the the prosodic prominence of [ax] sequences in Irish phonology. I further argue that an explanatory analysis of these patterns must make use of the notion of surface optimization. Alternative frameworks that eschew surface-oriented optimization mechanisms fail to account for synchronic and diachronic properties of the Irish plural system.