Posted on by JCPW

Joppke & Torpey, “Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison”

In April, Harvard University Press will publish Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison by Christian Joppke (University of Bern) & John Torpey (Graduate Center, City University of New York). The publisher’s description follows.

The status of Islam in Western societies remains deeply contentious. Countering strident claims on both the right and left, Legal Integration of Islam offers an empirically informed analysis of how four liberal democracies—France, Germany, Canada, and the United States—have responded to the challenge of integrating Islam and Muslim populations. Demonstrating the centrality of the legal system to this process, Christian Joppke and John Torpey reject the widely held notion that Europe is incapable of accommodating Islam and argue that institutional barriers to Muslim integration are no greater on one side of the Atlantic than the other.

While Muslims have achieved a substantial degree of equality working through the courts, political dynamics increasingly push back against these gains, particularly in Europe. From a classical liberal viewpoint, religion can either be driven out of public space, as in France, or included without sectarian preference, as in Germany. But both policies come at a price—religious liberty in France and full equality in Germany. Often seen as the flagship of multiculturalism, Canada has found itself responding to nativist and liberal pressures as Muslims become more assertive. And although there have been outbursts of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, the legal and political recognition of Islam is well established and largely uncontested.

Legal Integration of Islam brings to light the successes and the shortcomings of integrating Islam through law without denying the challenges that this religion presents for liberal societies.

Posted on by JCPW

Marshall, “Global Institutions of Religion: Ancient Movers, Modern Shakers”

In February, Routledge will publish Global Institutions of Religion: Ancient Movers, Modern Shakers by Katherine Marshall (Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown U). The publisher’s description follows.

This work fills a significant gap in the current literature by providing a concise introduction to religious institutions and an insightful analysis of their role in world affairs. Focusing on formal institutions specifically dedicated to governing religious communities, the work examines the intersections between religious and other global institutions, set against the fundamental question: why and how do these intersections matter?

The work explores the role of religion within key issues including: Human rights, Human security, International development and humanitarian relief, Climate change, Moral responsibilities.

The new forms that religious institutions are taking, their fit with human rights and democratic ideals, their changing nature in plural societies, are a highly relevant part of the global institutional picture and this book is essential reading for all students and scholars of global institutions, international relations and religion.

Posted on by JCPW

Samuel, “The OIC, the UN, and Counter-Terrorism Law-Making: Conflicting or Cooperative Legal Norms?”

Next August, Hart Publishing will publish The OIC, the UN, and Counter-Terrorism Law-Making: Conflicting or Cooperating Legal Norms? by Katja Samuel (barrister, UK). The publisher’s description follows.

The increasingly transnational nature of terrorist activities compels the international community to strengthen the legal framework in which counter-terrorist activities should occur, including at the intergovernmental level.

This unique, timely, and carefully researched monograph examines one such important intergovernmental organisation, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (‘OIC’, formerly the Organisation of the Islamic Conference). In particular, it analyses in depth its institutional counter-terrorist law-making practice, and the relationship between resultant OIC law and comparable UN norms. Furthermore, it explores two common (mis)assumptions regarding the OIC, namely whether its internal institutional weaknesses mean that its law-making practice is inconsequential at the intergovernmental level, and whether its self-declared Islamic objectives and nature are reflected within OIC law.

Where significant normative tensions are discerned between OIC and UN law – for example, the definitional impasse posed by the OIC in relation to the ongoing negotiations of the draft UN Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism – the monograph explores not only whether these may be explicable, at least in part, to the OIC’s Islamic nature, but also whether their corresponding institutional legal orders are conflicting or cooperative in nature, and the resultant implications for the international counter-terrorist framework.

This monograph is expected to appeal especially to national and intergovernmental counter-terrorist practitioners and policy-makers, and to all scholars interested in the interaction of Islamic norms within the wider international political system.

Posted on by JCPW

Scherer, “Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion”

In April, Cambridge University Press will publish Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion by Matthew Scherer (Union College). The publisher’s description follows.

Secularism is often imagined in Thomas Jefferson’s words as ‘a wall of separation between Church and State’. This book moves past that standard picture to argue that secularism is a process that reshapes both religion and politics. Borrowing a term from religious traditions, the book goes further to argue that this process should be understood as a process of conversion. Matthew Scherer studies Saint Augustine, John Locke, John Rawls, Henri Bergson and Stanley Cavell to present a more accurate picture of what secularism is, what it does, and how it can be reimagined to be more conducive to genuine democracy.

Posted on by JCPW

Laborde on Equal liberty, Non-Establishment, and Religion

Cecile Laborde (University College London) has posted Equal Liberty, Non-Establishment, and Religion. The abstract follows.

Egalitarian theories of religious freedom deny that religion is entitled to special treatment in law, above and beyond that granted to comparable beliefs and practices. The most detailed and influential defense of such an approach is Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager’s Religious Freedom and the Constitution (2007). In this essay, I develop, elucidate, and show the limits of the reductionist strategy adopted by Eisgruber and Sager. The strategy requires that religion be analogised with other beliefs and practices, according to a robust metric of comparison. I argue that Eisgruber and Sager fail to develop a consistent and coherent metric, and I further suggest that this failure is symptomatic of the broader difficulty encountered by liberal theory in fitting the concept of religious freedom into a broadly egalitarian framework.

Posted on by JCPW

Awrey, Blair & Kershaw on Ethics in Financial Regulation

Dan Awrey (University of Oxford), William Blair, and David Kershaw (London School of Economics) have posted Between Law and Markets: Is There a Role for Culture and Ethics in Financial Regulation? The abstract follows.

The limits of markets as mechanisms for constraining socially suboptimal behavior are well documented. Simultaneously, conventional approaches toward the law and regulation are often crude and ineffective mechanisms for containing the social costs of market failure. So where do we turn when both law and markets fail to live up to their social promise? Two possible answers are culture and ethics. In theory, both can help constrain socially undesirable behavior in the vacuum between law and markets. In practice, however, both exhibit manifest shortcomings.

To many, this analysis may portend the end of the story. From our perspective, however, it represents a useful point of departure. While neither law nor markets may be particularly well suited to serving as “the conscience of the Square Mile,” it may nevertheless be possible to harness the power of these institutions to carve out a space within which culture and ethics – or, combining the two, a more ethical culture – can play a meaningful role in constraining socially undesirable behavior within the financial services industry. The objective of this article is to explore some of the ways which, in our view, this might be achieved.

This exploration takes place across two dimensions. In the first dimension, we hold constant the core internal governance arrangements – corporate objectives, directors’ duties, board composition, committee structures and remuneration policies – within financial institutions. Read more

Posted on by JCPW

Fagan, “Believing in Russia – Religious Policy After Communism”

This October, Routledge will publish Believing in Russia – Religious Policy After Communism by Geraldine Fagan (Moscow correspondent for Forum 18 News). The publisher’s description follows.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of religious policy in Russia since the end of the communist regime, exposing many of the ambiguities and uncertainties about the position of religion in Russian life. It reveals how religious freedom in Russia has, contrary to the widely held view, a long tradition, and how the leading religious institutions in Russia today, including especially the Russian Orthodox Church but also Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist establishments, owe a great deal of their special positions to the relationship they had with the former Soviet regime. It examines the resurgence of religious freedom in the years immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, showing how this was subsequently curtailed, but only partially, by the important law of 1997. It discusses the pursuit of privilege for the Russian Orthodox Church and other ‘traditional’ beliefs under presidents Putin and Medvedev, and assesses how far Russian Orthodox Christianity is related to Russian national culture, demonstrating the unresolved nature of the key question, ‘Is Russia to be an Orthodox country with religious minorities or a multi-confessional state?’ It concludes that Russian society’s continuing failure to reach a consensus on the role of religion in public life is destabilising the nation.

Posted on by JCPW

Lowry (ed.), “The Epistle on Legal Theory”

This February, New York University Press will publish The Epistle on Legal Theory edited by Joseph E. Lowry (University of Pennsylvania). The publisher’s description follows.

The Epistle on Legal Theory is the oldest surviving Arabic work on Islamic legal theory and the foundational document of Islamic jurisprudence. Its author, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i (d. 204H/820AD), was the eponymous founder of the Shafi’i legal school, one of the four rites in Sunni Islam. This fascinating work offers the first systematic treatment in Arabic of key issues in Islamic legal thought. These include a survey of the importance of Arabic as the language of revelation, principles of textual interpretation to be applied to the Qur’an and prophetic Traditions, techniques for harmonizing apparently contradictory precedents, legal epistemology, rules of inference, and situations in which legal interpretation is required. The author illustrates his theoretical claims with numerous examples drawn from nearly all areas of Islamic law, including ritual, commercial law, tort law, and criminal law.

The text thus provides an important window into both Islamic law and legal thought generally and early Islamic intellectual history in particular. The Arabic text has been established on the basis of the two most important critical editions and includes variants in the notes, while the English text is a new translation by a leading scholar of Shafi’i and his thought. The Epistle on Legal Theory represents one of the earliest complete works on Islamic law, one that is centrally important for the formation of Islamic legal thought and the Islamic legal tradition.

Posted on by JCPW

Klarman, “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage”

This September, Oxford University Press published From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage by Michael J. Klarman (Harvard Law). The publisher’s description follows.

Same-sex marriage has become one of the most volatile issues in American politics. But if most young people support gay marriage, and if there are clear indicators that a substantial majority of the population will soon favor it, why has the outcry against it been so strong?

Bancroft Prize-winning historian and legal expert Michael Klarman here offers an illuminating and engaging account of modern litigation over same-sex marriage. After looking at the treatment of gays in the decades after World War II and the birth of the modern gay rights movement with the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, Klarman describes the key legal cases involving gay marriage and the dramatic political backlashes they ignited. He examines the Hawaii Supreme Court’s ruling in 1993, which sparked a vast political backlash–with more than 35 states and Congress enacting defense-of-marriage acts–and the Massachusetts decision in Goodridge in 2003, which inspired more than 25 states to adopt constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. Klarman traces this same pattern–court victory followed by dramatic backlash–through cases in Vermont, California, and Iowa, taking the story right up to the present. He also describes some of the collateral political damage caused by court decisions in favor of gay marriage–Iowa judges losing their jobs, Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle losing his seat, and the possibly dispositive impact of gay marriage on the 2004 presidential election. But Klarman also notes several ways in which litigation has accelerated the coming of same-sex marriage: forcing people to discuss the issue, raising the hopes and expectations of gay activists, and making other reforms like civil unions seem more moderate by comparison. In the end, Klarman discusses how gay marriage is likely to evolve in the future, predicts how the U.S. Supreme Court might ultimately resolve the issue, and assesses the costs and benefits of activists’ pursuing social reforms such as gay marriage through the courts.

From the Closet to the Altar will stand as the definitive one-volume history of the tumultuous emergence of same-sex marriage in American life as well as a landmark study of litigation, social reform, and the phenomenon of political backlash to court decisions.

Posted on by JCPW

Harris, “The Serpentine Wall: The Winding Boundary between Church and State in the United States”

This January, Transaction Publishers will publish The Serpentine Wall: The Winding Boundary between Church and State in the United States by James F. Harris (College of William and Mary). The publisher’s description follows.

The Serpentine Wall is chronologically structured, befitting a history of church-state separation in the United States. It begins with a history of ideas approach to the European backgrounds and colonial American experiments in theocracy and freedom of religion. It covers pre-modern American debates about religious freedom among the founding generation right up through the nineteenth century. The final section of the book focuses on the separation of church and state and how this has become a matter determined by the Supreme Court.

The resolution of the proper interpretation of the religious clauses of the First Amendment and the course of the boundary between church and state has been slow. Many changes that took place throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century have influenced the increasingly circuitous route taken by the Serpentine Wall between the two. The result has been an increased focus on social issues involving questions of interpretation of the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment.

The founding of the United States was a unique event in human history and the result of factors that are unlikely to be repeated. To understand the founding of a democratic country with a unique arrangement between church and state, it is important to view that development as both a product of and a departure from what had come before. Harris’ interesting, unique, philosophical viewpoint will be important to those interested in how the roles of church versus state have evolved in the United States.