Next week, I’ll be in Venice for a new, three-day international law-and-religion moot court competition. Hosted by a research institute, the Fondazione Studium Generale Marcianum, the competition brings together law students from the US and Europe to argue a case on religious accommodation. I’ll be one of the American judges, along with Judge Richard Sullivan of the SDNY (and one of CLR’s Board members) and Professor William Kelley of Notre Dame Law School.
The organizers of the competition have come up with an interesting new approach. Two noted scholars, Silvio Ferrari of the University of Milan and Brett Scharffs of BYU, will offer an overview of the issues for the audience, and then the student teams will argue the case before two moot courts, one simulating the American Supreme Court and the other simulating the European Court of Human Rights. (The European judges are Louis-Leon Christians of the Catholic University of Louvain, Mark Hill of Cardiff University, and Renata Uitz of Central European University Budapest.) On the final day of the competition, each court will render a judgment and announce the winning team.
The Marcianum”s approach to the competition highlights the fact that law and religion issues have gone international. And it introduces students, especially American students, to the comparative legal method. It should be a wonderful learning experience and a lot of fun, and I’m grateful to the organizers, especially Professor Andrea Pin of the University of Padua, for inviting me. Any of our readers at the competition, please stop by and say hello. I’ll try to blog from Venice if occasion allows. Not sure you can blog from a gondola, though.
‘Christianity and Religious Plurality’. The focus is on exploring the practical experience of Christians, who have often existed in a world of manifold belief systems and religious practices. Under the Presidency of Professor John Wolffe, the summer conference and winter volume brought together a fascinating series of lectures and communications, a selection of which are collected in this peer-reviewed volume. Three main areas of engagement emerge: contexts where Christianity was a minority faith, whether in the earliest years of the church, in the Mongol empire of the thirteenth century or under Ottoman rule in the fifteenth, or in contemporary Iraq, Egypt and Indonesia; responses to religious minorities in predominantly Christian societies, such as early-modern Malta or nineteenth- and twentieth-century London; and finally, Christian encounters with other religions in situations where no single tradition was obviously dominant. Offering an unusual perspective on Christian encounters with other faiths, this volume will appeal to students of religious studies and those interested in the cultural contexts in which Christianity has existed – and indeed continues to exist.
Muslims has provoked public anxiety. New government regulations seek not only to restrict Islamic practices within the public sphere, but also to shape Muslims’, and especially women’s, personal conduct. Pious Practice and Secular Constraints chronicles the everyday ethical struggles of women active in orthodox and socially conservative Islamic revival circles as they are torn between their quest for a pious lifestyle and their aspirations to counter negative representations of Muslims within the mainstream society.