Congratulations to our former Law and Religion Fellow, John Boersma (left), for placing his article, The Accreditation of Religious Law Schools in Canada and the United States, in the current issue of the BYU Law Review. John, who’s now pursuing a PhD at LSU, wrote the paper in my comparative law and religion seminar a couple years ago.
Here’s the abstract:
Ongoing litigation in Canada suggests that the legal status of religiously affiliated law schools could be in jeopardy. In Canada, regulatory authorities have sought to deny accreditation status to a religiously affiliated law school (Trinity Western University) due to its commitment to a traditional Christian understanding of marriage. According to Canadian provincial authorities, this commitment has a discriminatory effect on LGBT students. Similar events could potentially occur in the United States. It is possible that American regulatory bodies could seek either to rescind or withhold accreditation from a religiously affiliated law school because of the discriminatory effects of its policies.
This comparative Article argues that as a matter both of public policy and law, the regulatory bodies concerned with the accreditation of law schools in both Canada and the United States have ample reason to accredit religiously affiliated law schools. First, as a matter of public policy, diversity in the type of law schools is beneficial due to the pluralism it engenders. Pluralism has long been recognized as a force for social stability in liberal democracies and is continually cited as beneficial by both Canadian and American courts. Furthermore, as a matter of law, both Canada and the United States provide for a robust protection of religious freedom that encompasses religiously affiliated law schools. This Article concludes that, as a result, regulatory authorities in Canada and the United States ought to encourage the proliferation of religiously affiliated law schools.
Readers can download the article here. Keep up the good work, John!
Religion is a hot topic on the public stages of ‘secular’ societies, not in its individualized liberal or orthodox form, but rather as a public statement, challenging the divide between the secular neutral space and the religious. In this new challenging modus, religion raises questions about identity, power, rationality, subjectivity, law and safety, but above all: religion questions, contests and even blurs the borders between the public and the private. These phenomena urge to rethink what are often considered to be clear differences between religions, between the public and the private and between the religious and the secular. In this volume scholars from a range of different disciplines map the different aspects of the dynamics of changing, contesting and contested religious identities.
Bruno De Nicola investigates the development of women’s status in the Mongol Empire from its original homeland in Mongolia up to the end of the Ilkhanate of Iran in 1335. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters show a coherent progression of this development and contextualise the evolution of the role of women in medieval Mongol society. The arrangement serves as a starting point from where to draw comparison with the status of Mongol women in the later period. Exploring patterns of continuity and transformation in the status of these women in different periods of the Mongol Empire as it expanded westwards into the Islamic world, the book offers a view on the transformation of a nomadic-shamanist society from its original homeland in Mongolia to its settlement in the mostly sedentary-Muslim Iran in the mid-13th century.