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Law, State and Religion: An Inter-Disciplinary Conference in Honour of Shirin Ebadi

From September 16–17, University College Dublin School of Law will host Law, State and Religion: An Inter-Disciplinary Conference in Honour of Shirin Ebadi.

Dr. Ebadi, the first woman to achieve Chief Justice status in Iran, lost her post in the Tehran City Court after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.  The revolutionaries’ interpretation of Islam forbade women from holding such prominent public positions; thus, they demoted her from judge to an administrative position.  Since then, among her many accomplishments—winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, publishing innumerable books and articles, promoting international human rights, and advocating an interpretation of Islam that treats women as equals (“Whenever women protest and ask for their rights, they are silenced with the argument that the laws are justified under Islam.  It is an unfounded argument.  It is not Islam at fault, but rather the patriarchal culture that uses its own interpretations to justify whatever it wants.”)—she has been a practicing lawyer (a hard-won accomplishment for a woman in present-day Iran), taking on controversial defenses that have, at times, so aggravated Iranian authorities as to land her in prison.

The Nobel Foundation’s awarding institutions selected Dr. Ebadi for the Peace Prize because of her efforts to safeguard Iranian women, refugees, and children.  She was the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to receive the Award.

The Conference will feature Dr. Ebadi as keynote speaker.  Symposia include the intersection between rights, religion, and the law; human rights, religion, and the state; Islam and gender; and civil society, religion, and the Irish state.  Registration is available from €40–€75, for anyone lucky enough to be in Dublin in two weeks.  This CLR fellow looks forward to the scholarship and dialogue this Conference will certainly produce.

—DRS, CLR Fellow

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Alzate on Religion and Self-Interest in Locke

A tension exists at the heart of liberal political theory: a society that encourages individual rights is not so good at motivating citizens to make necessary sacrifices for the community as a whole. In a recent article, Beyond Rights: Religion Offsets Self-Interest in the Lockean State, Elissa Alzate (College of Wooster/UC-Davis) examines the thought of John Locke and argues that, for him, religion provides the solution: religious groups foster the social bonds that make cohesion possible in the liberal state. An abstract follows.  — MLM

 Liberal political thought embodies a tension between the citizen and the community. The liberal state is based on principles of individual rights and appeals to self-interest. Conversely, the political society created out of the liberal social contract must transcend the self-interest guiding independent individuals; the contract creates something greater than the aggregate individuals – a community, whose interest is greater than the interest of Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Conference: Is Islamic Sharia Law Coming to America?

The New York Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society is sponsoring a panel discussion, “Is Islamic Law Coming to America? And Should We Care?” in New York City on Monday, September 26. Panelists include David Forte (Cleveland-Marshall), Daniel Mach (ACLU), and Hon. Richard Sullivan (SDNY). Details are here.  — MLM

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Excluding Clergy from NYC’s 9/11 Commemoration

Next week, New York City will hold its annual commemoration of the 9/11 attacks. As in past years, families of victims and responders will attend, along with local and national politicians. There will be moments of silence and readings of a “spiritual and personal” nature.  But clergy will not participate. The city maintains that this is a quasi-private event for families of victims and responders, not outsiders (except those politicians, of course); that the city cannot invite everyone who wishes to attend; and that clergy have not participated in past years’ ceremonies.

One should respect the families’ wishes, and it’s true that families’ groups, like Families of September 11, apparently do not object to excluding clergy. But this is a public event, the city’s official commemoration. And some people suspect that the real reason New York has excluded clergy is to avoid “divisiveness,” particularly the divisiveness that would ensue if the city invited Muslim clergy to participate.

There are two problems with this. First, notwithstanding the controversy over the “Ground Zero” mosque, it is not at all clear that many New Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

DuBois’s “Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia”

Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (CUP 2011) by Thomas David DuBois (National University of Singapore) looks like a wonderful book about religion’s contributions to the history, politics, and law of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other East Asian nations.  The publisher’s description follows.  — MOD

Religious ideas and actors have shaped Asian cultural practices for millennia, and have played a decisive role in charting the course of its history. In this engaging and informative book, Thomas David DuBois sets out to explain how religion has influenced the political, social, and economic transformation of Asia from the fourteenth century to the present day. Crossing a broad terrain from Tokyo to Tibet, the book highlights long-term trends and key moments, such as the expulsion of Catholic missionaries from Japan, or the Taiping Rebellion in China, when religion dramatically transformed the political fate of a nation. Contemporary chapters reflect on the wartime deification of the Japanese emperor, Marxism as religion, the persecution of the Dalai Lama, and the fate of Asian religion in a globalized world.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Another View of Lynch v. Donnelly

Professor Frederick Gedicks (BYU Law), as Andrew Hamilton notes below, argues in the linked paper that Lynch v. Donnelly is a really terrible Establishment Clause decision — indeed, “anti-canonical.”  With respect, I see things a little differently than Fred.  Fred’s claim that “secularized” religious symbols drain such symbols of their “religious significance” is a quite common one.  “Secularism,” in Fred’s piece and for many academic critics of Lynch, means non-religious.  “Secular” and “religious” are antipodes, and it would be inconceivable that a symbol might partake of both qualities.  For Fred, the more “secular,” the less “religious.” 

This is why Fred is confounded and maybe even a little irritated by the Lynch majority’s twin claims that (1) the crèche conveys a “secular” meaning, inasmuch as it symbolizes “a significant historical religious event long celebrated in the Western World,” and (2) the secular significance of the crèche does not in any way reduce or diminish its religious significance.  Lynch, 465 U.S. 668, 680 (1984).  For Lynch’s critics, when the government commemorates a religious event by displaying a religious symbol, it concomitantly bleeds that symbol of its “religious” significance.  And this is also why critics like Fred prefer the dissenting position of Justice Brennan, who wrote that the majority was in reality “explain[ing] away” the crèche’s religious meaning,” or, as Justice Blackmun had it, that the majority was transforming the crèche into a “neutral harbinger of the holiday season.” 

But it does not seem to me that the meaning of symbols is a zero sum game. Read more

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Muniz-Fraticelli on The Distinctiveness of Religious Liberty

Victor M. Muniz-Fraticelli  (McGill – Faculty of Law) has posted The Distinctiveness of Religious Liberty. The abstract follows. – ARH

The model of religious freedom in diverse liberal-democracies has been mistakenly incorporated into the multicultural paradigm. The wholesale incorporation of the religious liberty paradigm into the multicultural paradigm is an institutional, historical, and conceptual mistake, and it distorts our understanding of the institutions that enshrine religious liberty and underlie our justification of them. The Western paradigm of religious liberty is a complex product of diverse historical conflicts and political traditions, and only contingently overlaps the multicultural argument. The purpose of this essay is to differentiate religious liberty from multiculturalism as theoretical categories, and to at least identify some of the consequences of this differentiation.

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Gedicks on Lynch v. Donnelly

Frederick Mark Gedicks (BYU – J. Reuben Clark Law School) has posted Lynch v. Donnelly and the Terminal Silliness of Secularized Religious Symbols. The abstract follows. – ARH

Prepared for a symposium, this essay argues that Lynch v. Donnelly (1983) belongs in the pantheon of anti-canonical bad Supreme Court decisions. Widely viewed as a victory for conservative Christians in their long-running battle against the secularization of public life, Lynch held that a state-sponsored Christmas nativity depicting the traditional biblical account of Jesus’s birth did not violate the Establishment Clause because it was surrounded by candy canes, Santa Clause, reindeer, and other secular symbols of the Christmas holiday.

The essay argues that the Lynch majority failed to explain why this was not a violation of the Establishment Clause, and also failed to articulate any principle that could be applied with even modest predictability in subsequent religious symbol cases, resulting in a line of decisions whose unifying rationale remains obscure.

Lynch and its progeny suggest that government may appropriate religious symbols for its own uses only if the context in which the symbol is displayed empties it of contemporary religious significance. Lynch is thus a pyrrhic victory for religious conservatives, an ironic dismissal of the relevance of faith to American public life that permits the government to use religious symbols only if it communicates that they are not religiously meaningful.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

“Law and Religion in Public Life” (Hosen & Mohr eds.)

This collection of essays, Law and Religion in Public Life: The Contemporary Debate (Routledge 2011), edited by Nadirsyah Hosen and Richard Mohr (both of Wollongong) focuses specially on Australian issues and also contains a number of interesting looking discussions on matters of more general relevance.  The publisher’s description follows.  — MOD

With religion at centre stage in conflicts worldwide, and in social, ethical and geo-political debates, this book takes a timely look at relations between law and religion. To what extent can religion play a role in secular legal systems? How do peoples of various faiths live successfully by both secular laws as well as their religious laws? Are there limits to freedom of religion? These questions are related to legal deliberations and broader discussions around secularism, multiculturalism, immigration, settlement and security.

The book is unique in bringing together leading scholars and respected religious leaders to examine legal, theoretical, historical and religious aspects of the most pressing social issues of our time. In addressing each other’s concerns, the authors ensure accessibility to interdisciplinary and non-specialist audiences: scholars and students in social sciences, human rights, theology and law, as well as a broader audience engaged in social, political and religious affairs. Five of the book’s thirteen chapters address specific contemporary issues in Australia, one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world and a pioneer of multicultural policies. Australia is a revealing site for contemporary studies in a world afraid of immigration and terrorism. The other chapters deal with political, legal and ethical issues of global significance. In conclusion, the editors propose increasing dialogue with and between religions. Law may intervene in or guide such dialogue by defending the free exchange of religious ideas, by adjudicating disputes over them, or by promoting a civil society that negotiates, rather than litigates.

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Stern on Anti-Shari`a Laws

Eliyahu Stern offers an interesting perspective on the anti-Shari`a laws addressed in my earlier post in his op-ed piece “Don’t Fear Islamic Law in America” in the New York Times this past Friday. Stern compares the bans on Muslim law to previous resistance to Jewish law in nineteenth century Europe. The comparison is also useful from an American historical perspective: as immigrants with distinctive religious traditions arrived in this country, they were often met with resistance by majority populations, but over time these cultures were gradually but steadily integrated and now generally co-exist peacefully in American society.  – JKH