This week’s collection of new pieces on SSRN includes an article on Catholic objections to Legal Realism by John Breen and Lee Strang; a history of Just War theory by Robert Delahunty; an article by Zoe Robinson on the definition of “religious institutions” in connection with the Contraception Mandate litigation; and two essays by Micah Schwartzman on religious and secular convictions.
1. John M. Breen (Loyola University Chicago) and Lee J. Strang (University ofToledo), The Forgotten Jurisprudential Debate: Catholic Legal Thought’s Response to Legal Realism. This article examines the critique of Legal Realism by Catholic scholars in the 1930s and 1940s. Legal historians have unfairly neglected this critique, the authors say, which was both profound and systematic. Catholic legal thinkers who objected to Realism drew on the worldwide revival of Neo-Scholastic philosophy taking place at the time.
2. Robert J. Delahunty (University of St. Thomas), The Returning Warrior and the Limits of Just War Theory. In this paper, Delahunty traces the history of the Just War tradition in Christian thought. Before the twelfth-century Papal Revolution, he writes, the Catholic Church treated the subject in a pastoral, unsystematic way. Soldiers who had killed in wartime were typically required to do penance. In the Papal Revolution, however, the Church transformed itself into an early modern state, equipped with a military force. “As an essential part of this epochal transformation, the Papal program required the Church to abandon its earlier skepticism about war and to settle on the view that war could be justifiable, even sanctified.”
3. Zoe Robinson (DePaul University), The Contraception Mandate and the Forgotten Constitutional Question. Robinson maintains that arguments about the ACA”s Contraception Mandate often neglect the first question: whether the claimants are “religious institutions” that merit constitutional protection. She develops a list of four factors that identify such institutions: “(1) recognition as a religious institution; (2) functions as a religious institution; (3) voluntariness; and (4) privacy-seeking.” Applying these factors, she argues that religious universities qualify as religious institutions, but not for-profit businesses or religious interest groups.
4. Micah Schwartzman (University of Virginia), Religion as a Legal Proxy. In a response to Andrew Koppelman, Schwartzman argues that affording legal protection to religion as such unfairly discriminates against people with non-religious commitments. He argues that the concept of religion should be expanded to include secular claims of conscience. A wide range of international and domestic laws already do so, he points out. Against the backdrop of these laws, the First Amendment’s singling out of religion “feels somewhat antiquated.”
5. Micah Schwartzmann (University of Virginia), Religion, Equality, and Public Reason. This is a review of Ronald Dworkin’s posthumous work, Religion without God, in which Dworkin argues that, as a moral matter, both religious and non-religious convictions deserve legal protection. Schwartzman agrees, but argues that Dworkin unfortunately resisted using the concept of public reason, familiar from the work of John Rawls and others. Schwartzman believes that reliance on public reason is “inevitable” for those, like Dworkin, “who accept that believers and nonbelievers deserve equal respect for their competing and conflicting views.”