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Volokh, “Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby: Corporate Rights and Religious Liberties”

volokh_ebookThis month, the Cato Institute will publish Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby: Corporate Rights and Religious Liberties by Eugene Volokh (UCLA School of Law). The publisher’s description follows.

Later this month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case- Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby- that has arisen as society tries to reconcile corporate rights with religious liberty.

Since Hobby Lobby’s founding, the Green family has managed their company in accordance with their Christian principles. Among the religious tenets guiding them is their moral opposition to contraceptives. However, within the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) thousands of pages is a requirement that corporations with more than 50 employees must provide coverage in their group health plans for certain medical services (contraceptives being one) or face severe penalties, which forces the Greens to choose between their religious principles or their business. The Greens sued to protect the right to exercise their religion, and now the case will be heard, front and center, in the Supreme Court.

Eugene Volokh, one of the nation’s foremost First Amendment scholars and founder of the renowned Volokh Conspiracy blog has been following and writing about these issues and this case and has braided all of his efforts together into this specially created ebook. Merging work he had previously published with new content and analysis, he offers an exceptionally clear, understandable, and compelling view of what can too often be a convoluted and highly complex area. The result is not only an ebook that analyzes a key case that will be decided by Supreme Court but a solid work that provides readers with a comprehensive primer on religious accommodation in the context of the ACA’s contraceptive mandate. In addition, the ebook begins with a comprehensive foreword by Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, which maps out the historical, legal, and current policy framework of the case.

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Werth, “The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths”

9780199591770_450This May, Oxford University Press will publish The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia by Paul W. Werth (University of Nevada). The publisher’s description follows.

The Russian Empire presented itself to its subjects and the world as an Orthodox state, a patron and defender of Eastern Christianity. Yet the tsarist regime also lauded itself for granting religious freedoms to its many heterodox subjects, making ‘religious toleration’ a core attribute of the state’s identity. The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths shows that the resulting tensions between the autocracy’s commitments to Orthodoxy and its claims to toleration became a defining feature of the empire’s religious order.

In this panoramic account, Paul W. Werth explores the scope and character of religious freedom for Russia’s diverse non-Orthodox religions, from Lutheranism and Catholicism to Islam and Buddhism. Considering both rhetoric and practice, he examines discourses of religious toleration and the role of confessional institutions in the empire’s governance. He reveals the paradoxical status of Russia’s heterodox faiths as both established and ‘foreign’, and explains the dynamics that shaped the fate of newer conceptions of religious liberty after the mid-nineteenth century. If intellectual change and the shifting character of religious life in Russia gradually pushed the regime towards the acceptance of freedom of conscience, then statesmen’s nationalist sentiments and their fears of ‘politicized’ religion impeded this development. Russia’s religious order thus remained beset by contradiction on the eve of the Great War. Based on archival research in five countries and a vast scholarly literature, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths represents a major contribution to the history of empire and religion in Russia, and to the study of toleration and religious diversity in Europe.

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Ferrari & Benzo (eds.), “Between Cultural Diversity and Common Heritage”

This April, Ashgate Publishing will publish Between Cultural Diversity and Common Heritage: Legal and Religious Perspectives on the Sacred Places of the Mediterranean edited by Silvio Ferrari (University of Milan, University of Leuven) and Andrea Benzo (Italian Embassy in Riyadh). The publisher’s description follows.

Going beyond the more usual focus on Jerusalem as a sacred place, this book presents legal perspectives on the most important sacred places of the Mediterranean. The first part of the book discusses the notion of sacred places in anthropological, sociological and legal studies and provides an overview of existing legal approaches to the protection of sacred places in order to develop and define a new legal framework. The second part introduces the meaning of sacred places in Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought and focuses on the significance and role that sacred places have in the three major monotheistic religions and how best to preserve their religious nature whilst designing a new international statute. The final part of the book is a detailed analysis of the legal status of key sacred places and holy cities in the Mediterranean area and identifies a set of legal principles to support a general framework within which specific legal measures can be implemented. The book concludes with a useful appendix for the protection of sacred places in the Mediterranean region.

Including contributions from leading law and religion scholars, this interesting book will be valuable to those in the fields of international law, as well as religion and heritage studies.

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Around the Web This Week

Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

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Around the Web This Week

Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

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Fabre & Lazar (eds.), “The Morality of Defensive War”

9780199682836_450This month, Oxford University Press published The Morality of Defensive War edited by Cécile Fabre (Lincoln College, Oxford) and Seth Lazar (Australian National University). The publisher’s description follows.

Most of us take it for granted that wars in defence of one’s political community are the quintessential just wars. Indeed, while in recent years philosophers have subjected all of our other assumptions about just war theory to radical revision, this principle has emerged largely unscathed.

But what underpins the morality of defensive war? In this book, leading moral and political philosophers both show the profoundly challenging nature of that question, and advance novel answers to it. The first part exposes the deep tension between the individualist foundations of much contemporary philosophy and plausible conclusions about the morality of defensive war. The second part offers an individualist attempt to resolve that tension, while the third seeks to justify defensive war by appeal to more collectivist values.

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Lefebvre & Beaman (eds.), “Religion in the Public Sphere”

9781442626300This April, the University of Toronto Press will publish Religion in the Public Sphere: Canadian Case Studies edited by Solange Lefebvre (Université de Montréal) and Lori G. Beaman (University of Ottawa). The publisher’s description follows.

The place of religion in the public realm is the subject of frequent and lively debate in the media, among academics and policymakers, and within communities. With this edited collection, Solange Lefebvre and Lori G. Beaman bring together a series of case studies of religious groups and practices from all across Canada that re-examine and question the classic distinction between the public and private spheres.

Religion in the Public Sphere explores the public image of religious groups, legal issues relating to “reasonable accommodations,” and the role of religion in public services and institutions like health care and education. Offering a wide range of contributions from religious studies, political science, theology, and law, Religion in the Public Sphere presents emerging new models to explain contemporary relations between religion, civil society, the private sector, family, and the state.

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Around the Web This Week

Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

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Dreisbach & Hall (eds.), “Faith and the Founders of the American Republic”

9780199843350This April, Oxford University Press will publish Faith and the Founders of the American Republic edited by Daniel L. Dreisbach (American University) and Mark David Hall (George Fox University). The publisher’s description follows.

The role of religion in the founding of America has long been a hotly debated question. Some historians have regarded the views of a few famous founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, as evidence that the founders were deists who advocated the strict separation of church and state. Popular Christian polemicists, on the other hand, have attempted to show that virtually all of the founders were pious Christians in favor of public support for religion.

As the essays in this volume demonstrate, a diverse array of religious traditions informed the political culture of the American founding. Faith and the Founders of the American Republic includes studies both of minority faiths, such as Islam and Judaism, and of major traditions like Calvinism. It also includes nuanced analysis of specific founders-Quaker John Dickinson, prominent Baptists Isaac Backus and John Leland, and Theistic Rationalist Gouverneur Morris, among others-with attention to their personal histories, faiths, constitutional philosophies, and views on the relationship between religion and the state.

This volume will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in the place of faith in the founding of the American constitutional republic, from political, religious, historical, and legal perspectives.

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Abend, “The Moral Background”

k10263This March, Princeton University Press will publish The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics by Gabriel Abend (New York University). The publisher’s description follows.

In recent years, many disciplines have become interested in the scientific study of morality. However, a conceptual framework for this work is still lacking. In The Moral Background, Gabriel Abend develops just such a framework and uses it to investigate the history of business ethics in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s.

According to Abend, morality consists of three levels: moral and immoral behavior, or the behavioral level; moral understandings and norms, or the normative level; and the moral background, which includes what moral concepts exist in a society, what moral methods can be used, what reasons can be given, and what objects can be morally evaluated at all. This background underlies the behavioral and normative levels; it supports, facilitates, and enables them.

Through this perspective, Abend historically examines the work of numerous business ethicists and organizations–such as Protestant ministers, business associations, and business schools–and identifies two types of moral background. “Standards of Practice” is characterized by its scientific worldview, moral relativism, and emphasis on individuals’ actions and decisions. The “Christian Merchant” type is characterized by its Christian worldview, moral objectivism, and conception of a person’s life as a unity.

The Moral Background offers both an original account of the history of business ethics and a novel framework for understanding and investigating morality in general.