After its initial founding by the Council on Religion and Law at Harvard, the Journal of Law and Religion had its first life at Hamline University School of Law beginning in 1983. This essay is a history of its second life—from 1987/1988 to 2013—describing the vision and the people who pursued that vision through the journal in those years and some of the roundtables and symposia it published.

Turkey’s Europeanization process provides a particularly interesting case study of the extra-jurisdictional impact of European Union (EU) law, both through policy convergence and through the so-called Brussels effect. Formally, Turkey must adopt certain EU rules due to its status as an EU candidate country, but its candidacy process has been lengthy and uncertain, resulting in partial and uneven adoption of EU rules. Nevertheless, EU-style policymaking has persisted in various policy areas, including environmental and climate policy. This paper aims to analyze the convergence of climate change policies between the EU and Turkey by employing multidimensional scaling, a method that enables the visualization and examination of the connectivity and intensity of cooperation between states. For the period from 2007 to 2023, our comparative analysis demonstrates that policy divergence occurs when the EU’s share of Turkey’s total trade decreases and when political challenges are experienced. On the other hand, periods of policy convergence coincide with periods of increased trade volume and expanded trade opportunities. The results suggest that through its market size and regulatory capacity, the EU exerts soft power which forces Turkey to align its climate policies with the EU to protect and maintain its competitiveness in the European marketplace.

One of the most immediate effects of the Russian war against Ukraine was the unprecedented influx of Ukrainian refugees in some countries. This article analyzes temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees in two countries—the Czech Republic and Poland, which represent the countries most exposed to immigration from Ukraine. The authors compare the political and legal response of both countries to the institute of temporary protection to reveal similarities and differences in the scope, tools, and nature of temporary protection, including causes and consequences. Both countries go beyond the minimum standards set in the EU Temporary Protection Directive and differ in their approach to its implementation. The authors claim that although the concept of temporary protection has expanded with the current situation, it allows significant benefits in allowing fast-track integration into the labor market, which aligns with the concept of refugees’ “deservingness.” However, the duration of temporary protection is a major limitation to refugees’ integration due to the emphasis on voluntary return to the country of origin.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was concerned about both poverty and race, inextricably linked because of the long and brutal history of racial injustice in housing, employment, and education. What Dr. King called the beloved community reflected a vision of a world built on peace, human dignity, and shared material abundance for all people. To explore this linkage of poverty and race, I employ two related Christian theological concepts: the universal destiny of the goods of the earth and the social mortgage that encumbers all private property to ensure the equitable provision of those goods to all and for all generations. I analyze the ways in which the universal destiny of goods can be mediated through U.S. property law by structuring the ownership and use of land and buildings within the context of social obligation. But while the law has the capacity to ensure ownership, security, and infrastructure for all, U.S. society has failed to make the necessary payments on the social mortgage that would create this reality—a failure due primarily to severe racial and economic injustices, both historical and contemporary. Yet there is hope: I present examples that offer glimpses of the beloved community.