CLR will host a panel, “Careers in Law and Religion,” at the Law School on Tuesday, October 23, from 5:30-7:30 pm. The panel, which is co-sponsored by the St. John’s Career Development Office, will bring together lawyers from a variety of practices — government, firms, NGOs, and religious tribunals — to discuss how their work implicates the growing field of law religion. Panelists include Elizabeth Cassidy (US Commission on International Religious Freedom), Peter Johnson, Jr. (Leahey & Johnson), Maureen Liccione (Jaspan Schlesinger), Keith Sharfman (St. John’s), Amardeep Singh (Sikh Coalition), and Diana Verm (Becket Fund). Details are here.
Lecture: The Arab Spring and International Law
Fordham’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work will host a lecture, “The Arab Spring: Its Impact on International Politics, International Law, International Organizations,” on Thursday, November 1. The speaker will be Yassin El-Ayouty, who teaches Islamic Law at Fordham. Details are here.
Ben-Porat, “Between State and Synagogue”
This December, Cambridge University Press will publish Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Contemporary Israel by Guy Ben-Porat (Ben-Gurion University). The publisher’s description follows.
A thriving, yet small, liberal component in Israeli society has frequently taken issue with the constraints imposed by religious orthodoxy, largely with limited success. However, Guy Ben-Porat suggests, in recent years, in part because of demographic changes and in part because of the influence of an increasingly consumer-oriented society, dramatic changes have occurred in secularization of significant parts of public and private lives. Even though these fissures often have more to do with lifestyle choices and economics than with political or religious ideology, the demands and choices of a secular public and a burgeoning religious presence in the government are becoming ever more difficult to reconcile. The evidence, which the author has accrued from numerous interviews and a detailed survey, is nowhere more telling than in areas that demand religious sanction such as marriage, burial, the sale of pork, and the operation of businesses on the Sabbath.
Corbin on the Contraception Mandate
Caroline Mala Corbin (University of Miami School of Law) has posted The Contraception Mandate. The abstract follows.
Under the new health care regime, health insurance plans must cover contraception. While religious employers are exempt from this requirement, religiously affiliated employers are not. Several have sued, claiming that the “contraception mandate” violates the Free Exercise Clause, the Free Speech Clause, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This essay explains why the contraception mandate violates none of them.
Panel: “Whose God Rules?”
This Friday, Harvard Law School will host a panel on “Whose God Rules?”, a recent book that outlines a new “theolegal” theory of American government. The description follows. Details for the panel are here.
Is the United States a secular nation or a theolegal democracy? The theolegal theory describes a political system that allows public officials to use theology in its democratic process to shape law without instituting an official state religion. Join co-editors of the new book “Whose God Rules?” (Palgrave Macmillan) for a review of how preeminent scholars debate theology theory, which describes the gray area between a secular legal system, where theology is dismissed as irrational and a threat to the separation of religion and state, and a theocracy, where a single religion determines all law. The United States is neither a secular nation nor a theocracy, leading scholars to ask whether the United States is a theolegal democracy. If so, whose God rules?