Religious organizations play an active role in the American economy. They have traditionally been involved in service industries such as health care and education. More recently, certain religious organizations have also become involved in such diverse activities as psychological counseling and economic development. Moreover, the largescale hierarchial nature of certain churches make them an employer of thousands. Consequently, the risk of entanglement in civil litigation has greatly increased for religious organizations. Even though the first amendment has typically shielded religious organizations, the growing tendency of courts to grant wider judicial access to plaintiffs with claims of first impression poses a threat to the litigation exposure of religious organizations.

The rule has long existed that religious organizations, like everyone else, can be sued if they participate in secular or “non-ecclesiastical” activities. For instance, if religious organizations enter into a contract to purchase land, they are as Uable on that contract as any other individual or organization in society. Likewise, religious organizations have also become liable for the negligence or abuses committed by their members during the course of counseling services offered to lay persons, even if that counseling involved religious matters.

The area of greatest uncertainty and highest risk in the legal responsibilities of religious organizations, however, is not taking place in the realm of secular activities; rather, it is taking place increasingly in more ecclesiastically-related areas. The Catholic Church, for instance, has been held responsible for the spiritual and counseling activities of its priests.

James Luther Adams died last summer at the age of 92. He was one of four or five giants in his generation of American Christian ethicists. Many members of this society who were doctoral students under him have themselves become important teachers and writers of religious ethics.

George Huntston Williams has described Adams as one of the three most significant figures in the history of the Unitarian Universalist denomination, yet Adams grew up as the son of a Baptist and Plymouth Brethren preacher. Adams lived in tension but not in rejection with this Fundamentalist youth. On the one hand, he found lacking there what became his constant passion. Christian life must be carried out in the midst of the institutions of society.

Abortion, along with same-sex unions, is perhaps one of the world's most polarizing issues today. Laws on abortion vary across different jurisdictions, from prohibiting abortion under all circumstances to freely allowing it without restriction as to reason. Unlike rights such as freedom from torture or of speech, failure to recognize abortion rights is not necessarily the product of illiberal governments known to abuse human rights, nor is allowing abortion indicative of a good human rights record. Extensive rights to terminate a pregnancy may be symptomatic of a government's policy for population control, as in the case of China, or it may be an expression of the liberal philosophy of autonomy, as in the case of Canada.

From the nineteenth-century exhortations of legal ethics pioneer David Hoffman to the current pop culture provocations of Al Pacino, the story of the legal profession has been told through the religious imagery of the priesthood. While this analogy certainly has a bit of rhetorical flourish at its core, it reflects the widespread perception of the unifying, central role that the law plays in modern American society. Past eras may have looked to religion as the common framework under which everyday existence proceeds, but the law has long since usurped it. So while priests, as administrators providing access to that unifying framework in their role as mediators between God and man. were once essential figures in the collective life of society, today their place has been taken by lawyers, who provide access to our common framework of legal rights and privileges.

Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is one of the most accomplished and diversely talented jurists in the recent history of the federal courts. Philosopher, theologian, historian, and poet, Noonan has been, first and foremost, a scholar of the law. He has devoted his professional career to a truth which we frequently lose sight of: the law, so seemingly complete in itself as a system of thought and expression, is an essential branch of general literature. A science, however inexact, the law is a humanistic pursuit as well, and no one in the past four decades has pursued the law with such humanistic fervor—a humanism enlivened by religion—as John Noonan.

Stereotypes tend to perpetuate images far outdistanced by events. Massachusetts, founded by the Congregationalist English, had by the early nineteenth century become a Unitarian stronghold and a mecca for immigration from Ireland and Canada. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new Catholic archbishop of Boston could announce (in 1908) that the Catholic Church in Massachusetts had assumed the mission of the Puritan Church. By the time Noonan came of age, the divisions of the nineteenth century surfaced chiefly in the superficialities that often serve as voting guides: Massachusetts would elect a good Catholic to statewide office in preference to a Protestant, but a good Protestant in preference to a bad Catholic. Ethnic differences had become blurred by economic changes; religion was important, but subordinate to civic responsibilities.

If one might be permitted a somewhat reductionist synoptic contrast between the three Abrahamic religions, Islam could perhaps be placed midway between what might be termed a legalistic Judaism and a theological Christianity. That is because it is a virtually unquestioned assumption in modern Islam that theology and legal reasoning in Islam are permissible only to ascertain God’s will expressed in the Qur'ān and the Sunnah. In other words, generally accepted Islamic scholarship holds that these primary sources constitute the authentic and foundational sources of law and religious and legal practice are organically linked to them. Thus, it is widely accepted that no human jurisprudential innovation that explicitly contradicts the Qur'ān and the Sunnah has ever managed to be incorporated into the body of literature that governs Muslims' practices and worship.

In June of 1995, the Chief Reporter for the Secretary of State for Scotland, Miss Gillian Pain, completed a Public Inquiry for an application for a coastal superquarry on the Western Isles of Scotland. The company, Redland Aggregates Limited, proposed to extract and transport by sea upward of five million and less than 12 million tons of rock a year. The rock, a feldspar called anorthosite, would be sold as road aggregate throughout Europe. At a national level, the proposal became the Scottish test case for Agenda 21, the blueprint for sustainable development arising from the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in June of 1992. At a local level, this Public Inquiry highlighted and defined community concerns about the development, of which religion was primary. The significance of the religious dimension of the superquarry debate extended from the local to the national and international spheres.

To place the testimonies presented by Mr. Mcintosh, Professor MacLeod, and Chief Sulian Stone Eagle Herney in perspective, it is necessary to understand the role religion plays in daily life on Harris and in the superquarry proposal process. On first appearance, a proposal for one of the world's largest coastal superquarries seems devoid of any religious implications. However, much of the local debate before and during the Inquiry revolved around religious and theological issues. In the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain, where the separation of church and state is inconceivable, the Western Isles of Scotland stand out as a place where religion is still one of the most fundamental guides to policy decision-making. The people of Harris share with the Mi'kmaq of Canada a set of expectations about the role of religion in politics.

The term “customary law” has been variously defined by the judiciary, legislatures and by academic lawyers who have attributed to it equally varying characteristics. In the former Eastern Region of Nigeria, the term has been defined to mean a rule or body of rules regulating rights and imposing correlative duties, which obtains and is fortified by established usage. The Evidence Laws of Nigeria similarly define custom to mean “a rule which, in [a] particular district, has from long usage obtained the force of law.” Allott, the pioneering scholar of African customary law, also defined it to refer to “the rules which trace back to the habits, customs and practices of the people which engender and support the norms expressly formulated from time to time for the decision of disputes.”

“African Law” has come to be identified as a term that describes the customary laws of the various peoples and communities who have come under a colonial power.

The study of customary law was initially undertaken by curious anthropologists who went far and wide throughout the colonial possessions of their mother country to discover and describe the lives of the natives for the consumption of their academic colleagues. In their endeavor to understand their subjects better, colonial administrators often commissioned or otherwise sponsored such studies and ultimately put these discoveries to good use in the service of the imperial power. The anthropologists were followed—or, some would argue, were preceded—by legal and administrative officers in the service of the colonial office. While they were writing their memoirs or otherwise commenting on their experiences in the service, they occasionally described how the received English law fared in its transplanted soil but they hardly took any interest in analyzing its interaction with and impact on the native laws with which it co-existed in the colonial territories.

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.

After delivering a Carlson Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1994, Hannan Ashrawi was asked by an audience member if a newly formed, independent State of Palestine would adopt the Sharīa (Islamic law) as the law of the land. The question reveals a deep seated fear in the American mind about Islamic justice. Because Islamic concepts of law and justice have developed from a very different worldview, they seem incomprehensible to us. We don't understand why Muslims argue about theology when talking about legal cases that appear in the news.

The Islamic community is organized as a theocracy, where God is the ruler of the community. In such a community, there is very little doubt that God is the ultimate authority in all things, including questions of law. There might, however, be considerable doubt about how the human members of the community respond to, make use of, and/or interpret God's intentions. Islam is no exception to this rule. Throughout its history, groups of people have answered questions about God and the community in different ways.