At the center of Muslim life sits The Qur'an — the Recitation — scripture for Muslims. Islamic dress, though understood intimately and expressed culturally by Muslims, seems to pose several dilemmas in the U.S. Yet, the most used translation of The Qur'an states:

Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them: And Allah is well acquainted with what they do.

And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof: that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their fathers, their husband's fathers, their sons, their husband's sons, their brother or their brothers' sons, or their sisters' sons, or their women, or the slaves their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex: and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. And O you believers! Turn all toward Allah that you may attain bliss.

Modern consumer credit law is a large and complex body of law. Underneath the complexity, however, is a simple goal: to ensure that consumers are treated fairly and to prevent, or at least to redress, overreaching and abuse by creditors. To this extent, modern consumer law can be said to reflect a felt sense of societal responsibility to a particularly vulnerable group.

We tend to think of consumer credit law as a modern phenomenon; and indeed, the vast majority of consumer credit laws in this country have appeared since the late 1960s. But our generation did not invent consumer protection law; many of our modern rules have antecedents which date back for centuries. Indeed, consumer credit transactions are as old as civilization, and even the earliest societies regulated at least some lending and credit practices.

Ancient Israel was no exception; its legal codes contained many rules on lending practices. While these rules were not nearly as complex as our modern rules, they did address a remarkably wide range of issues which we would identify today as consumer protection issues. As part of a larger body of humanitarian laws and customs designed to protect against undue hardship, the rules on credit practices were similar in principle to our modern consumer laws in that they reflected a sense of responsibility toward the poor and most vulnerable members of society.

Nineteenth century jurists sought to make law a science like any other. They believed that the law was not an unprincipled mass of archaic and contradictory rules, nor an extinct body of Latin words that should be venerated in a church reliquary and seldom studied. Rather, they said that it was time for law to take its place in the university and to be dissected under the microscope of scientific analysis. It was by these methods that law's fundamental axioms would be uncovered—which would in turn explain the relationship of all its parts to the whole. And with the right set of principles, new data could be effortlessly incorporated into an ever-growing scientific taxonomy of the law.

This mode of thinking dominated both European and American legal jurisprudence in the mid- to late-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, although it went by different names. One fundamental thread ran throughout—the law was not unprincipled, but logical. It could be reasonably explained and rationally ordered. This paper demonstrates that Rabbis Isaac Jacob Reines and Moses Avigdor Amiel, two important Jewish thinkers living at the turn of the twentieth century, saw Jewish law, or halakha, in the same light. Although Reines and Amiel may not have been directly influenced by secular jurisprudence, many of the elements of this classical legal science provide an interesting parallel to the answers these two thinkers gave to some of the oldest problems of Jewish law. Most notably, the way in which Reines and Amiel explained the connection between the Torah's oral and written components, as well as the way in which they asserted the internal coherence of halakhic jurisprudence, was similar to the legal formalism of their contemporaries.

She'elah (Question): May Jews assist others in committing suicide or request that others assist them in their own suicides?

Teshuvah (Answer):

Killing oneself and murdering others have always been technically possible but forbidden in Jewish law. In our time, though, the matter has taken on new dimensions. On the one hand, while people in the past had no choice but to endure the pain of dying, with minimal medication available to ease their suffering, now we have sophisticated ways to diagnose levels of pain and to calibrate pain medication to need. We also have developed hospice care, where the patient is supported physically, psychologically, and socially by a whole team of people, including family and friends. These factors should diminish the number of people who seek to take their lives.

Throughout history — and throughout the world — religious minorities of all faiths generally have not fared very well at the hands of religious majorities. Sadly, that has been the norm rather than the exception. And the Jews were always a religious minority in every country in which they lived. The seventeenth century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, spoke both from knowledge and personal experience when he wrote in his Pensees: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” All peoples, of course, are products of their collective historical experience. The Jews are no exception.

It is an honor to be asked to give the 2002 annual lecture in honor of James Luther Adams, a great scholar, a great teacher, a great man. I remember him well, and miss his wisdom and his wit. He lives on, not only in his wide-ranging scholarly writings but also in the memories of his many creative actions and of his caring personality, memories still shared by dozens of his former colleagues and a multitude of his students.

It is also an honor to be asked to associate this lecture with the program on Issues of Faith and the Practice of Law sponsored by the Georgia Chief Justice's Commission on Professionalism, the Atlanta Bar Association, and the Georgia Justice Project. I have had the privilege of attending some of the afternoon sessions of that program at which there were interesting and useful discussions of the lawyer's calling to bring his religious faith into his work, to serve God in his practice, and not to neglect what Jesus, in rebuking the Pharisees, called “the weightier matters of the law, which are justice and mercy and good faith.”

Sir William Blackstone's hyperbolic defense of the common law rights of Englishmen to private property, drawn from the immutable law of nature, was a comfort to conservative lawyers in the early American republic as a reasoned philosophical and legal defense of property against the uncertainties of John Locke's social contract. The seeds of Jacksonian democracy, in which popular sovereignty went hand-in-hand with the people's self-evident right to the pursuit of happiness, threatened to relativize and erode the social position of the propertied class. In this situation American lawyers vigorously asserted absolute rights to property that could transcend the vagaries of politics.

“The title of our lands,” wrote Jesse Root proudly in 1798, “is free, clear and absolute, and every proprietor of land is a prince in his own domains, and lord paramount of the fee.”

The two greatest dangers to religious liberty in the twentieth century have been sectarian violence and state repression. If the death toll from sectarian violence runs into the millions, the number of those who have died under state repression runs into tens of millions. It is our immense privilege to have with us Irina Ratushinskaya. A fine poet and a women of great courage, Irina was sentenced to seven years in jail as a prisoner of conscience, first writing those poems with match sticks on bars of soap and then smuggling the poems out to her husband through fellow prisoners who learned them by heart as messages of truth and hope. Ladies and gentlemen, with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend to help her read the poems in English, Irina Ratushinskaya.

These are heady times in America's law and religion conversation. On the campaign trail in 1999, then-candidate George W. Bush declared Jesus to be his favorite political philosopher. Since his election in 2001, legal commentators have criticized both President Bush and the Supreme Court for improperly basing their decisions on their sectarian Christian convictions. Though we pledge to be one nation under God, a recent characterization of the law and religion discourse sees America as two sub-nations divided by God. Moreover, debate concerning the intersection between law, politics and religion has moved from the law reviews to the New York Times Sunday Magazine, which has published over twenty feature-length articles on these issues since President Bush took office in 2001. Today, more than anytime in the past century, the ideas of an itinerant first-century preacher from Bethlehem are relevant to American law.