John Noonan was my teacher some twenty-five and more years ago. I was then a graduate student at the University of California, trying to discover enough about the history of the law of the Church to write something sensible about it. He took me under his wing. He suggested a subject, and he taught me—at least he showed me—the possibility of seeing larger themes in the details of legal and historical research. Attention to the details was essential, but no less important was thinking about their background and their implications. It was a lesson I might have learned in law school. Apparently I had not. This lesson came back to me forcefully when, in more recent days, research on the development of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England raised the subject of the place of excommunication in the subject's early history. Excommunication, dealing as it does with the complex interrelationships between legal doctrine and human behavior, is a subject about which Judge Noonan might have written a wonderful book.

The norms that the official legal systems of North American and European states apply do not derive directly from any religion. While some of those norms, such as some of the norms governing marriage, do originate, historically, in religion and religious law, no norms are today enforced by those legal systems because the norms are part of a specific religious legal order. And yet, adjudication according to religious norms is commonplace. In North America and Europe, the legal systems applying norms associated with specific religions to adherents of those religions are principally nonstate community tribunals. Outside this Northwestern world, state legal systems, particularly those of Muslim-majority jurisdictions, often permit religious normative materials to be applied to adherents of the relevant religions as a matter of state law. Both situations are examples of legal pluralism.

The popularity of the application of religious norms by state legal systems throughout much of the contemporary world raises a challenge for the Western assumption that state-enforced legality and expressly religious norms should stay apart. Can a modern state provide its citizens, residents and others subject to its power with a just and stable legal order by referring them to norms associated with their several religions and enforced by state courts?

On June 25, 1988, leaders in government, religion and business signed the Williamsburg Charter in Colonial Williamsburg. I felt privileged to be one of them.

The Williamsburg Charter is an historic document that reaffirms the first sixteen words of the Bill of Rights. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free expression thereof.” We stand in awe of these men of Williamsburg who, more than 200 years ago, inspired these words. We salute their special genius. We admire their courage, for these sixteen words were to change, in a most remarkable way, the future course of history, both of our nation and the world.

People were to be free to pursue, without interference, those things about which they felt most deeply — those elemental questions of conscience that give meaning to life. Yet, the affirmation of religious freedom would have meant nothing without the protection of a strong, abiding sense of mutual responsibility for its preservation. We must always remember that, in the words of the Charter, “Rights are best guarded when each person and group guards for all others those rights they wish for themselves.”

It is commonplace for the English to regard their age and culture as “post-Christian.” What exactly is meant by this label is not always clear, but it seems meant to bespeak a hardheaded realism accompanied by a kind of wistfulness for a more certain, vibrant, robust past. So while supporting note is often taken of the low rate of church attendance in England, the sense of loss runs deeper, as if all that is left from the past is a kind of “domesticated pantheism” which somewhat ironically operates as a “bulwark against religion.” Reminders of this bygone culture are found in a countryside of handsome churches, cities landmarked by grand cathedrals, and a ceremonial clergy whose robes and scepters make for great spectacle and some good TV; but the churches are empty and the clergy are said to be mostly dispirited, effete, irrelevant, “enfeebled and unsure.” The term “post-Christian,” however, carries an even deeper charge insofar as it suggests something more about the state of English culture in the late twentieth century than simply the decay of the established Church as the institutional bearer of the main nourishment of Western civilization. In some sense, we are to suppose that, in England at least, the Christian world is dead and that the established Church of England remains but a many-branched museum, staffed with actors playing uncertain parts whose demise as a part of the apparatus of state is near at hand.

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Samuel Brown Wylie, an Irish-Presbyterian minister of a group of Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians known as the Covenanters, and William Findley, a United States Congressman and also a descendant of the Covenanters, debated the Constitution's compatibility with Christianity and the proper bounds of religious uniformity in the newly founded Republic. Their respective views were diametrically opposed, yet each managed to borrow from different aspects of earlier political traditions held in common while also laying the groundwork for contrasting political positions which would more fully develop in the decades to come. And more than a few times their views seem to criss-cross, supporting contrary trajectories from what one might expect.

Their narrative, in many ways strange, challenges certain “Christian” understandings of early America and the Constitution, yet it also poses a few problems for attempts at a coherent theory of secularity, natural law, and the common good in our own day.

Samuel Brown Wylie is an obscure figure in American history. As a Covenanter, Wylie was forced to immigrate to America due to his involvement in the revolutionary United-Irishmen in Ulster. After finding it impossible to unite with other Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Wylie became the first minister in the “Reformed Presbyterian Church of the United States,” which would also be called “the Synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church.” According to his great-grandson, Wylie also went on to become the vice-Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.

In the article The Use of Natural Law in Early Calvinist Resistance Theory, David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary (California), analyzes natural law as it appeared in the writings of several sixteenth—century resistance theorists—John Knox, Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, Theodore Beza, Francois Hotman, and the unknown writer of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Van Drunen's article is much needed, since Richard Tuck, in his otherwise astute 1979 study on natural law, does not adequately address Reformation-era developments, focusing instead on Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, and other seventeenth-century theorists. Nevertheless, I take issue with Van Drunen's assertion that these writers were all “committed to the theology of Calvin” and were “early Calvinist resistance theorists.” One could make the case that most of these writers were, but there is one notable exception: English reformer, humanist, bishop, and polemicist John Ponet.

Law and religion have been dealt with by legal scholars, theologians and those working in the social sciences and humanities for years. Traditionally, studies of law and religion in the legal literature have been devoted primarily to consideration of church and state issues raised by claims based on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. These issues find their way into the law school curriculum in courses on Constitutional law where the perspective taken is distinctly legal. In such courses the focus is on religious freedom and the proper relation of the state to organized religion as a matter of Constitutional law. These concerns have provided the major focus for studies of law and religion.

In the past ten years a new interest in the study of law and religion has emerged. Notable evidence of this is the formation and subsequent activities of the Section on Law and Religion of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), the creation of the Council on Religion and Law, the development of a special Task Force on Ethics and Law within the Society of Christian Ethics along with an increase in scholarly writing and the creation of new journals.

Before Americans fought their British parents for freedom, we black Africans had fought the Boers in several wars for the preservation of ours. Kings Tshaka, Sekhukhuni and Makhado were continuing where their foreparents had left off. Before today's racist Nationalist Party was born in 1914, we had already established, in 1912, the Native National Congress, today's African National Congress. Before I knew the word “politics,” I had already been uprooted with my community three times in 1951, 1959 and 1961, to make room for whites in newly declared white areas. Before I knew the word “torture,” I had witnessed the brutal beatings of men and women on farms in the Northern Transvaal. Before I knew the word “apartheid,” I had already been denied timely education and daily bread. Before I learned anything about percentages and equality, I already knew that “white” meant more food, more land, more money, more cattle, better housing, better schooling, better health facilities. Before I heard the word “terrorist,” I was already being terrorized. I was already being chased around in Louis Trichardt for a passbook, or for being in town after 9:00 p.m., or for fun. Before I knew the concepts of oppression and exploitation, I knew that our people were killed and buried on the Bethal potato farms.

As we all know James Luther Adams is a very hopeful person. This was most clearly seen in Jim's suggestion that I give the James Luther Adams lecture this year. My guess is that he heard that the overall theme of this year's annual meeting was justice and he hoped that, as a lawyer and a person who allegedly was doing theology from the vantage point of a lawyer, I should have something to say about the subject.

Several problems come to mind immediately with this expectation. The first is the problem of saying anything that JLA has not already said with greater depth and humor. The second problem is best expressed by the story of the young law school student who naively asked one of his law school professors to tell him what was meant by justice. The professor responded that, if he wanted to find out about justice, he should go across the street to the divinity school. He crossed the street only to be told to reverse directions and ask someone at the law school. We might explain this by saying that both schools are limited by narrow perspectives—perhaps a positivistic perspective at the law school and a pietistic perspective at the seminary. Another answer might be that each has trouble trying to figure out what justice is all about. In reading the latest discussions of justice, I gained a new appreciation for the slipperiness of the subject. Is Clarence Darrow right when he said about justice, “no one knows what it means.”

In Indonesia, law reform is one of the important mandates of the national reform agenda, including the restructuring of various legal and political institutions at all levels of government, the regulatory implementation of the 1945 Constitution at the village level, and the ideological renewal necessary to make these changes real in Indonesian society. The policy direction of the People's Consultative Council (MPR) has changed from domination by the central authority toward freedom, autonomy and local government empowerment. Laws that were once imposed from the top now reflect power-sharing with local governments. In particular, the government has granted special (and virtually unlimited) autonomy to the province of Nangroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD, also known as Aceh). This article will explore how that autonomy has been influenced by a more robust adoption of Shari'ah law in Aceh.

When the New Order rule fell on May 21, 1998, Indonesia moved from a centralized power to democratization, a process of legal development “from, by and for the people” through a decentralized system. The promulgation of Law 22 (1998) providing for local autonomy (which was amended in 2004 by Law 32) and Law 25 on the respective financial authority of the central and local governments is concrete evidence that decentralization is real in Indonesia.

In 1968, a young Robert Cover wrote what he later called a “short polemic” against judicial complicity in the Vietnam War. “Polemic” is something of an understatement. Cover's short book review of an 1856 abolitionist broadside directed against judicial enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act became the occasion for a powerful general indictment of morally blind “obedience to, let alone enforcement of, law which violates all that is worthwhile in human community”.

Drawing on the memory of the Holocaust and “the screaming silence of the German people,” Cover excoriated the federal judiciary for “re-main[ing] faithful to its long tradition as executors of immoral law,” in relation to enforcement of the draft laws in the Vietnam War era:

No judge has resigned in protest. No judge has availed himself of the opportunity presented by a draft case to instruct the public on the moral issues of the war. No judge has publicly engaged in creative judicial obstruction of the war effort.