Categories such as religion and law are social constructs, proposed for some purpose or other, good or ill, but whose use is worthy of serious question. Consider, e.g., Karl Barth's insistence that Christianity is not a religion or Dietrich Bonhoeffer's coinage of “religionless Christianity.” I will later offer a way of delineating how I use these categories of religion and law, but I am mindful in doing so that there are many ways these, and allied terms, are invoked. We should acknowledge, for instance, that there are many Christianities; many forms of Buddhism; and differing kinds of Islam. We should take note of the serious question whether "customary law" is really “law.” How about “natural law”—is it really law or a “brooding omnipresence in the sky”? Are Torah, Shari'a, Dharma, and Tao cognate terms in some sense? Are they simultaneously “religion” and “law”? In what respect are canon law and common law both “lawful”? Should we adopt Wittgenstein's proposal that words, after all, are but tools embracing a “family of meanings”?

On April 17, 1990, in Employment Division v Smith, the Supreme Court decided that neutral laws of general applicability may be applied to restrict or forbid religious exercise, and that such applications raise no issue under the free exercise clause. The opinion removes many of the issues discussed in this journal from the scope of positive constitutional law.

The Court noted some exceptions. Whether anything remains of free exercise depends on future cases interpreting those exceptions and interpreting the Court's requirement that laws regulating religion be neutral. The Court recognized constitutional protection for religious speech and religious instruction of children, and if interpreted generously, those exceptions could protect a large proportion of religious conduct. If the exceptions and the neutrality requirement are interpreted narrowly, the free exercise clause has little independent content.

Our world is in abundance of most different kinds of legal systems, but none of them is as thoroughly imbued with constitutional ideas and categories as the American law. Thus, the dedication of an article dealing with a concept of constitutional law to an American judge and scholar seems not inappropriate. The contribution focuses on a legal term of specifically continental European thinking, the concept of “Wirtschaftsverfassung” or, translated literally, of “economic constitution.” I will try to explain on which premises and under which circumstances this legal term has been developed during the first decades of our century.

Concepts often share the fate of human thoughts in general: they appear for the first time in certain contexts, they journey through time and space, they flourish in one place and sink in another; for long periods they may be missing yet they come to life again all of a sudden in a new context. The concept of the economic constitution is such a case, too. It can be found already in the Physiocrats, but no fixed place is assigned to it; every now and then it has been used by authors of the 19th century but without any chance of gaining a foothold; in our century, however, it secures the status of a central concept for legal doctrine and theory of constitution, at least among the German jurists. So, unlike many other juridical concepts, this one does not root in a common European heritage like ancient Roman law or the law of the medieval Church; and with regard to the political and juridical ideas of the Natural Law School and the Enlightenment the continuities are so sparse and faint that it is hardly possible to trace the lines back over the centuries.

One scholar marks postmodernism's birth with the demolition of a housing project that had been designed with the best principles enlightened science and architecture had to offer. Residents found it uninhabitable. Local government found it impossible to police. What had once been heralded as a magnificent achievement and a boon to the poor ended as a pile of rubble.

Another author claims postmodernism was born when the Berlin Wall fell under the picks and hammers of those who had been hemmed in by the “scientific” ideology it stood for as well as the real blocks and mortar that long separated East and West. When the wall fell, the regime founded on an explicit effort to shed the confines of religion and custom for revolutionary reason did not take long to die. The age of the totalitarian secular orthodoxy died with it.

Technological consciousness and libertarian doctrine reduce the material world to an instrument—or better, to an amorphous resource existing solely for those ends which we freely choose. We are trapped in matter without true form or meaning.

Even for the Christian, such reduction has grave consequences. God resides in a distant heaven or in a distant time. Only after years of exile in a nature bereft of divinity can we hope, perhaps, to be rewarded with bodily salvation in a different universe. In the meantime, any spirituality we hold to must be necessarily non-material— founded in a dualistic belief in the presence of the intangible Deity whispering to our own intangible selves. We are put asunder, into godless brains and disembodied souls.

In his article, Keown articulates what I see as a basically valid reading of the implications of the texts of the Pali Canon on the issues at hand. I particularly like his formulation, ‘to deny death and cling to life is wrong, but equally wrong is to deny life and seek death.’ As the aging Arahat Sariputta says in the vv. 1002-03:

Keown focuses a fair amount of his discussion on the suicide of a few near Arahats. Though I broadly agree with his analysis of these cases, they do pertain to rather rare and exceptional types of people, while for the ordinary person, various central Buddhist values and considerations straightforwardly make it clear that suicide is highly inadvisable. While Buddhism emphasizes that there is much suffering in life, this can, paradoxically, help dissuade a Buddhist from giving in to despair. If suffering of various kinds, gross or subtle, is to be expected in life, then there is less reason for a person to take particular problems so personally—as if the world is conspiring against him or her.

The debate surrounding the so-called “right to die” has commanded increasing public attention over the last decade. Opinion polls in many Western democracies would appear to show increasing support for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, and a number of recent legal developments have further advanced the cause. As a result of court decisions since 1984, euthanasia has been legally permissible in the Netherlands; physician-assisted suicide was legalized in the State of Oregon in 1994 as a result of a ballot initiative, and in 1995 a voluntary euthanasia Bill was passed in the Northern Territory, Australia. But, even more recently, the “right to die” campaign has suffered reverses. The implementation of the Oregon legislation has been halted by a Federal court pending a determination of its constitutionality; the Northern Territory legislation was overturned by the Australian federal parliament in 1997, and in July 1997 the United States Supreme Court, reversing the decisions of lower courts, declared that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.