One of the ironies in perceiving schizophrenics as violent is that they are the recipients of more violence than practically any of the rest of us. To lock someone up in a mental hospital, to pass electricity through their cranium until they are stupefied, to give them drugs that cure symptoms the way alcohol cures sobriety, to give them a label that will forever prejudice nearly everyone against them—these are the most common versions of our violence against those we call schizophrenic. In spite of the elaborate science and rhetoric about how all this is to help them to recover, nothing is so obvious in how we treat them as our fear, contempt, and most of all, our resulting neglect of them, and their continuing vulnerability.

This is not to deny that those we call “schizophrenic” are confused. Indeed, they are engaging a spiritual struggle that overwhelms them, and may well have done so for many years. It is an underlying suspicion of this chapter that their spiritual struggle is one of the central reasons we are so violent toward them.

Ironically, certain contemporary international human rights norms appear to place governments in an adversary relationship to certain peoples, such as Hasidic and Orthodox Jews, whose attempted destruction provided the impetus for modern human rights law. This raises the paradoxical spectre of human rights law being used as a tool of cultural genocide.

This conflict is, of course, not confined to Hasidic and Orthodox Jews; indeed, it appears that the majority of people on the earth are identified with a people-group whose cultural/religious practices violate certain international human rights norms. While it is common to use Islam as an example, this paper initially concentrates on traditional Judaism because of the special place of the Holocaust as a catalyst for the modern international human rights movement.

Set: Four wooden high-backed chairs arranged two to each side of a simple oak desk upon which sits a water canister, ashtray, copies of The Hidden God (by Lucien Goldman, Thody Translation 1964), Economic Analysis of Law (by Richard Posner, 3d. Ed. 1986), The Plague (by Albert Camus), Les Lettres Provinciales (by Blaise Pascal), and several volumes of the Supreme Court Reporter.

Scene One: Mr. Allen enters first, carrying a sheaf of photocopied papers, and sits behind the desk. Next enter Mr. Posner, Mr. Pascal, Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Kelman all carrying similar papers. Holmes and Posner take seats to Allen's right; Kelman and Pascal seat themselves to Allen's left.

Mr. Allen: Gentlemen, I would like to thank you for coming. I know that Mr. Pascal has had an especially difficult trip. I myself just flew in from the coast, and boy are my arms tired (polite chuckles from Posner and Kelman).

The tradition of Kemalist secularism (laiklik) in Turkey is often cited to distinguish Turkey as an exceptional case among predominantly Muslim countries. While it is true that the Turkish Constitution, laws, and legal opinions approach the relationship between the state and religion very differently than those of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or even Indonesia, it would be wrong to underestimate the role that religion plays in the formation of Turkish legal norms, including citizen understanding of those norms. There is a wealth of literature describing the nature of Turkish secularism and its evolution. A number of both quantitative and qualitative studies inquire about the preference for Shari'a among Turkish voters. The typical question asks whether respondents favor the establishment of a Shari'a state. Over the past fifteen years, these surveys have received response rates ranging between five and twenty-five percent in favor of such a state. However, these results are extremely problematic, because they do not provide any context or meaning for “the establishment of a Shari'a state,” either for those who favor it or for those who oppose it. This study begins to unpack the range of possible meanings attributed to Shari'a within Turkey, both among voters and among intellectuals, as a framework forfuture empirical studies and as a basis for deeper understandings of the role of Islam within Turkish law and politics.

My agenda here is Roman Catholics in the American legal profession, from George Higgins's Jerry Kennedy to Judge Samuel Alito's joining the four other Catholics to make a majority on the federal Supreme Court. (I thought, as I said this in Washington, just before the Senate confirmation hearings in January 2006, that some in attendance may not have thought about this, and may have wanted to leap to their feet and phone their senators.)

Begin with ethnographic narrowing: When I talk about Catholic lawyers in the U.S., I mean to talk about descendants of the late immigrants—that is, people whose ancestors came here between the end of the Civil War and the end of World War I, when Congress stifled European immigration. I am talking, closer to home, about the twenty-five or thirty American law schools that were set up to provide vertical mobility to the children and grandchildren of the late immigrants. There were, to be sure, Catholic lawyers in this country before the late immigrants and the Catholic law schools. Roger Taney was a Catholic, although we don't brag about him much. Lord Baltimore no doubt had a few Catholic lawyers in tow when the Carrolls and the Calverts came to Maryland in 1734. But the immigrants and the Catholic law schools have provided most of the numbers; they are at the heart of the lawyers I am thinking about here. “A people within a people,” as David Gregory puts it.

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.”

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. …

— U.S. Constitution, First Amendment

The Religious Liberty clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution are a momentous decision, the most important political decision for religious liberty and public justice in history. Two hundred years after their enactment they stand out boldly in a century made dark by state repression and sectarian conflict. Yet the ignorance and contention now surrounding the clauses are a reminder that their advocacy and defense is a task for each succeeding generation.

This is a study of women's rights in Islamic societies, a relatively insignificant subject to the people who live in those societies. The Muslim population of the world is in excess of one billion and approximately one-half of this number, or five hundred million, are female. Geographically, Islam is practiced in all of Arabia, most parts of the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Africa, parts of Spain, and Portugal.

Based on the available literature one may conclude that the Muslims are not particularly interested in this topic. The information that is available is relatively one-sided, expressing the male point of view and his perception of what women's rights ought to be. One reason for this lack of interest is that women, the principal characters, generally lack the formal education necessary for the understanding of their own rights and privileges. Throughout history, there have been very few people willing to advocate this cause. As stated by Dr. Fyzee, a Muslim scholar, the unfortunate position of the women is due to the fact that women, being illiterate, are ignorant of their rights; and men, being callous, choose to remain ignorant.

There is an inclination in some circles in the United States to take umbrage whenever church people address problems of public policy. The inclination seems to be based on the supposition that preachers have no business “intermeddling in politics.” In 1981 Senator Barry Goldwater took offense when Jerry Falwell and other “new rightists” denounced his nominee for the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor. The Senator issued a statement denouncing the “Moral Majority” for “undermining the basic American principles of separation of church and state by using the muscle of religion towards political ends.”