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Douglas et al. on the Relationship between Religious and Civil Law Regarding Marriage

Gillian Douglas (Cardiff Law School), Norman Doe (Cardiff Law School), Sophie Gilliat-Ray (Cardiff School of History, Archaeology and Religion), Russell Sandberg (Cardiff Law School), and Asma Kahn (former research associate at Cardiff University) have posted Social Cohesion and Civil Law: Marriage, Divorce and Religious Courts. The abstract follows.—YAH

This is the report of the project, ‘Social Cohesion and Civil Law: Marriage, Divorce and Religious Courts’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which explored how religious law functions alongside civil law in the area of marriage and divorce. It examines the workings of three religious courts in detail: a Jewish Beth Din; a matrimonial tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church; and a Muslim “Shariah Council”. It finds that these tribunals provide an important service for their users in enabling them to remarry within their faith, which serves both to enable them to remain within their faith community and to regularize their position with the religious authorities. None of the tribunals sought greater autonomy and all recognized the supremacy of state law.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Reid on “The Devil Comes to Kansas”

Professor Charles Reid (U. St. Thomas law) has posted a fun piece, The Devil Comes to Kansas: A Story of Free Love and the Law, which discusses one of the earliest American cases in which various notions of privacy and “freedom of choice” were first raised and which, as Professor Reid says, have become watchwords of modern constitutional law.  The abstract follows.  — MOD

State v. Walker (1887) is an important but hitherto neglected landmark case in the development of the right of privacy. The case involved the “autonomistic” or “free-love” marriage of Edwin C. Walker and Lillian Harman, daughter of Moses Harman, the radical newspaperman.

Edwin and Lillian, who rejected state control over marriage, proclaimed themselves married in the fall of 1887, although they declared that their union was neither permanent or exclusive. Prosecuted for illegal cohabitation because of their refusal to obtain a marriage license, they and their defenders developed a vocabulary that would profoundly influence the future path of American law.

Their supporters in the radical press began to speak of the right of women to control their own bodies, woman’s right to reproductive autonomy, and a right of sexual privacy. Indeed, it was in the midst of this controversy that the expression “freedom of choice” was used, probably for the first time, in its modern meaning by Lillian Harman writing from prison. Read more

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Justifying Rights: The Dual Importance of Freedom and Virtue

Linda C. McClain and James E. Fleming, both of Boston University School of Law, have published Respecting Freedom and Cultivating Virtues in Justifying Constitutional Rights.  The paper draws on the works of Dworkin (and other giants in liberal political theory such as Rawls) to critique the “communitarian” or “civic-republican”  perspective of Michael J. Sandel’s bestseller, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to do? (2009).  Professor Sandel rejects values-neutral conceptions of legal justice in socio-moral debates like that concerning the validity of gay marriage—arguments that emphasize individual freedom to act; rather, he argues that only arguments with a full-fledged consciousness of the actual, moral virtues—or lack of them—that such social institutions embody will satisfactorily resolve these cultural conflicts.

In contrast, McClain and Fleming argue that both values-neutral and values-based arguments—arguments for individual freedom of action as well as arguments about the virtue embodied in social institutions like marriage—have and will be instrumental to resolving such questions.  Please see the authors’ abstract after the jump:

Read more

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Van der Vyver on The Contours of Religious Liberty in South Africa

Johan D. van der Vyver (Emory University School of Law) has posted The Contours of Religious Liberty in South Africa. The abstract follows. – ARH

As far as religion and religious diversity are concerned, the South African Constitution can be described as one of profound toleration and accommodation. The Constitutional Court has on several occasions emphasized the importance of religion for the State. South Africa is therefore not a secular State but can best be described as a religiously neutral State.

The constitutional principle of non-discrimination applies not only to discrimination by the State, but also to discrimination by private individual and non-State institutions, including religious institutions. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Discrimination Act of 2000 amplified the constitutional proscription of discriminatory practices. When applying the non-discrimination decree to religious institutions, State courts will not unduly interfere in the internal sphere sovereignty of such institutions.  Read more

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Inazu on Stanley Hauerwas and the Law

As Marc DeGirolami has previously noted, John D. Inazu (Wash. U. School of Law) organized the September 9, 2011 Law & Contemporary Problems symposium, “Theological Argument in Law: Engaging with Stanley Hauerwas.” Inazu has recently posted a special editor’s introduction to that symposium entitled, Stanley Hauerwas and the Law: Is there Anything to Say? The abstract follows. – ARH

This essay is the special editor’s introduction to a forthcoming symposium in Law & Contemporary Problems that explores the work of theologian Stanley Hauerwas and its implications for law and legal scholarship. Although not well-known in the legal academy, Hauerwas is an important scholar and public intellectual who has written scores of books and hundreds of articles, been named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time Magazine, and delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures. He has arguably “articulated the most coherent and influential political theology in and for the North American context” and has been “at the forefront of major transformations in theology” including virtue ethics, the role of narrative and community, and understandings of medicine and illness. The inattention to Hauerwas in legal scholarship is particularly odd given that he has written for decades about issues central to thelaw: violence, liberalism, bioethics, theories of disability, theories of interpretation, capital punishment, just war theory, reconciliation, public reason, patriotism, euthanasia, abortion, and religious freedom, to name only a few of the more obvious connections. And the general lack of familiarity with Hauerwas by legal scholars (even among many of those who write in the area of “law and religion”) has contributed to a growing divide. Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Zucca on the Case For Monism in European Law

Lorenzo Zucca (King’s College London) has posted Monism and Fundamental Rights in Europe.  Though the piece does not directly reference or discuss cases of religious liberty in Europe (nor, curiously, Isaiah Berlin for that matter), the application of the author’s approach to such questions should be evident.  Among other reasons, I am posting the piece because it represents a point of view nearly diametrically opposed to the one that I defend in my forthcoming book, Tragedy and History: The Quality of Religious Liberty.  The abstract follows.  — MOD

Fundamental Rights in Europe are protected by national, supranational and international judicial bodies. Yet, the likelihood of discrepancies between the solutions reached by those bodies opens the whole practice to a number of problems and risks. Legal Pluralists claim that the risk of conflicting views should not be regarded as a problem, and should instead be regarded as an occasion to engage in a dialogue between various jurisdictions.

In this article I resist the legal pluralist claim and suggests that the only way of understanding the relationship between fundamental rights and law is monist. There are two opposite monist understandings of the same relationship. On the one hand, there is a value monist approach which argues for the unity of value across law and morality. On the other hand, there is a legal monist perspective, which argues for the unity of legal norms and claims that disagreements about fundamental rights are settled by competent institutions within the monist legal framework. I defend the latter legal monist position and suggests that that is the best way of understanding law and fundamental rights at the national, supranational and international level.

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MacDougall & Short on Religion and Sexual Orientation

Bruce MacDougall (UBC Faculty of Law) and Donn Short (University of Manitoba – Faculty of Law) have posted Religion-Based Claims for Impinging on Queer Citizenship. The abstract follows. –JKH

Competing claims for legal protection based on religion and on sexual orientation have arisen fairly frequently in Canada in the past decade or so. The authors place such competitions into five categories based on the nature of who is making the claim and who is impacted, the site of the competition, and the extent to which the usual legal and constitutional norms applicable are affected. Three of the five categories identified involve a claim that a religion operate in some form in the public area so as to impinge on the usual protection of equality on the basis of sexual orientation. The authors examine the basis of claims for such religion based exceptionalism and argue that acceptance of the religion claim in these three public-area categories would involve unjustifiable curtailment of citizenship for queer people and could undermine the equality gains that have been made by this group.

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Grover on Religious Exemptions to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Samuel T. Grover (a student at Boston University School of Law) has posted Religious Conscience Exemptions to the PPACA Health Insurance Mandate. The abstract follows.—YAH

Within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA” of the “Act”), the individual health insurance mandate (“individual mandate”) – the provision which dictates that in 2014 and beyond all citizens must either have a form of health insurance or pay a tax penalty – has already been subjected to a number of constitutional challenges. The 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 11th Circuits have all heard challenges brought on similar grounds, with largely inconsistent results. While the focus of much of this litigation has centered around whether the individual mandate is a constitutional extension of Congress’s taxing power, this paper sets aside the Commerce Clause question that has demanded so much attention from the courts and asks instead whether the two religious exemptions written into the PPACA have struck an appropriate balance between the Constitution’s Religion Clauses. The paper argues that as currently drafted, the “religious conscience exemption” to the PPACA’s individual mandate threatens the efficacy of the Act and potentially exposes it to legal challenges on Free Exercise and Establishment Clause grounds.

This paper begins by analyzing the history behind the first of two religious exemptions written into the individual mandate, the religious conscience exemption, which allows certain religious individuals to avoid the individual mandate’s tax penalty without acquiring health insurance. The language of the exemption was taken directly from an existing religious conscience exemption to Social Security, designed to apply narrowly to the Old Order Amish. Because the purposes and goals of the PPACA differ from those of Social Security, this paper argues that it was unwise to write this same religious exemption into the PPACA.  Read more

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Ashe on American Law, Religion, and Women

Marie Ashe (Suffolk University Law School) has posted Privacy and Prurience: An Essay on American Law, Religion, and Women. The abstract follows.—YAH

In my studying of American law – in its relation to religion and to privacy and to women – the current bookends of my readings consist of two sets of texts: the first, certain writings from the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony; the second, certain writings from the United States Supreme Court of very recent years. The first set consists of reports and records generated in Massachusetts incident to the Antinomian Controversy of 1836-1838, particularly reports of the trials of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, and accounts of the “monstrous births” of each. The second set includes writings from year 2007: the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (its most recent abortion decision), and the amicus briefs filed therein.

Examining and juxtaposing those sets of writings, this essay discloses striking resonances between the 17th-century and the 21st-century texts. It documents in each: religio-judicial prurience in examinations and constructions of female bodies; and disappearance of “privacy” as a protector of women’s autonomy and women’s liberty.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Pierik and Van der Burg on Neutrality

Roland Pierik (Amsterdam) and Wibren Van der Burg (Erasmus University Rotterdam) have posted a new piece, What Is Neutrality?, on SSRN.  The abstract follows. — MLM

One of the central axioms of liberalism is that government should treat its citizens with equal respect and concern. One way to achieve that goal is that government should be neutral with respect to the variety of ideas of the good life its citizens endorse. The classic liberal interpretation of neutrality is that government should not embrace or penalize particular conceptions of the good life, but should provide a neutral framework within which the various and potentially conflicting conceptions of the good life can be pursued. Important ways of providing such a neutral framework are the employment of general laws that affect all citizens equally – or so it is assumed – and the exclusion of religious arguments and symbols from political debates and the public sphere in general.

In this paper we want to reinvestigate the question of liberal neutrality. We contend that liberal discussions have been dominated – if not hijacked – by one particular interpretation of what neutrality could imply, namely, exclusive neutrality, that aims to exclude religious and cultural expressions from the public sphere. Although we acknowledge the importance of this exclusive interpretation of neutrality in specific contexts, we will argue that that it is only one of several relevant interpretations. To substantiate our claim, we will firstly elaborate upon inclusive neutrality. To do so, we will formulate two supplementary interpretations of neutrality: proportional neutrality and compensatory neutrality. Secondly, we will argue that in most contexts inclusive proportional neutrality is more appropriate than exclusive neutrality.

Our elaboration of these different interpretations of the neutrality ideal can help to acknowledge that some political disputes should not be seen in terms of the antithesis between liberal neutrality and illiberal multiculturalism but of a clash between various valid but incompatible interpretations of what liberal neutrality can imply. In these cases there is no simple or straightforward answer to the question which interpretation of neutrality should prevail. Moreover, since neutrality is not an end in itself, it must be balanced against other liberal values, mentioned above. Philosophical analysis can only show which values are at stake in this balancing act; actual choices can only be made in specific contexts.