Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Chicago-Kent Law Review to Publish Symposium on Neutrality

The Chicago-Kent Law Review will publish a symposium, “The Future of the Establishment Clause: Neutrality, Religion, or Avoidance?”, next month. Edited by Bruce Ledewitz (Duquesne), the symposium will discuss

the future of the Establishment Clause, confronting three interrelated questions: 1) If the Court is to reaffirm government neutrality toward religion, can such neutrality coexist with resurgent popular religious belief at the same time that it serves the needs of a growing national secularism?; 2) Conversely, if the Court is to permit government embrace of religion, can it do so without alienating the large numbers of  nontheistic believers and nonbelievers?; and 3) How far can the Court take the turn to standing before it undermines noneconomic approaches to injury-in-fact in all of constitutional law and before it renders even classic violations of the Establishment Clause essentially unchallengeable?

Contributors include Richard Albert (Boston College), Christopher Lund (Wayne State), Samuel Levine (Touro), Zachary Calo (Valparaiso), and Mark Rahdert (Temple). For more information, please contact Editor in Chief Maggie Master at the Chicago-Kent Law Review.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Ghent University to Host Conference on the Burqa

On May 9, Ghent University (Belgium) will host an international conference highlighting empirical work on the wearing of the face veil, or burqa. Speakers will address not only the sociology of the burqa, but also the possible consequences of laws, like those in Belgium and France, that ban it. A description of the conference agenda is here. H/T: Strasbourg Observers.

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2012 Religious Legal Theory Conference Lectures Now Available

Lectures from the 2012 Legal Theory Conference – “The Competing Claims of Law and Religion” – are now available online in audio and video format.  Marc DeGirolami’s lecture, entitled “The Method of Tragedy and History Applied” is available here and Mark Movsesian’s lecture, entitled “Crosses and Culture: Public Religious Symbols in the U.S. and Europe” is available here (lecture begins at 35:15).

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Me Next Week

Just a little note on a couple of talks I am giving next week, in case CLR Forum readers have a chance to stop by and say hello.

On Wednesday, April 18, I’ll be participating in a panel at Yale Law School run by the Yale Catholic Law Students’ Association dealing with the HHS Mandate and Religious Liberty.  The discussion begins at 6:00.  More details about the event here.

On Friday, April 20, I’ll be at the University of St. Thomas under the auspices of the Terence J. Murphy Institute’s Hot Topics: Cool Talk program run by the gracious Lisa Schiltz.  The Honorable Richard Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York will be joining me.  I’ll be talking about the state of punishment theory and will discuss (a little bit) some of the insights of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and Thomas Aquinas with respect to the justification of punishment (I hope to give a cool talk, but the odds are not so good).  Details here.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Ayelet Shachar at St. John’s Law School

The Center for Law and Religion is pleased to announce that Professor Ayelet Shachar (Toronto) will visit us at St. John’s Law School next Monday, April 16, at 4:15 pm.  Hers is the sixth and final session in our ongoing seminar, Colloquium in Law: Law and Religion.  Professor Shachar will discuss her ongoing work involving the legal status of religious tribunals as well as more general problems of religious pluralism.  Among the papers for consideration will be her thoughtful chapter on state, religion, and the family in this book.

Academics in the New York area and beyond are welcome to attend.  Please let me know.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Justice Scalia at St. John’s Law School

The Center for Law and Religion is pleased to announce that Justice Antonin Scalia will visit us at St. John’s Law School next Monday, April 2, at 4:15 pm.  His is the fifth session in our ongoing seminar, Colloquium in Law: Law and Religion.  Justice Scalia will discuss his opinions in several of the Court’s religion clause cases, focusing especially on Employment Division v. Smith; Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah; Lee v. Weisman; Bd. of Education of Kiryas Joel Village Sch. Dist. v. Grumet; Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free Sch. Dist.; Capitol Square Review and Advisory Bd. v. Pinette; and McCreary County v. ACLU.

Academics in the New York area and beyond are welcome to attend, but for this visit, an RSVP to me or to Mark is essential.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Call for Papers: The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity

The Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra (Spain) has posted a call for papers for a conference this summer on “The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity.” Details are here.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Call for Papers: Reframing Punishment at Oxford

The following is a call for papers for an interesting looking conference at Oxford in September dealing with new approaches to thinking about punishment.  I reproduce it here because one of the concepts it raises is religious and/or spiritual punishment.  Interested parties should contact shs@inter-disciplinary.net.  

The concept of punishment has a long history and diverse cultural, social and criminological meanings.  Research and debate is often focused on the offender, the offence, the state and legal codification.  In contrast, this project seeks to re-frame these debates in order to combine the insights they produce with broader cultural meanings, social representations and ritualistic or other activities.  Therefore, the aim of the project is to develop different ways of understanding the penetration and complexity of shared understandings of punishment from a variety of perspectives, approaches and practitioner experiences.  Reframing the debate might be done through papers aimed at the personal or social levels.  We encourage unique approaches to punishment in terms of boundary control, whether it is control of evil, the politically subversive, the economically disruptive, or punishment in pursuit of system stability or marginalisation of liminality.   Papers might also cover punishment issues relating to defining the contours of disgust, desire, dread, or the abject.  They may even consider the operation and consequences of both wrongdoing and various forms of societal/social punishment.  Accordingly the project welcomes papers, work-in-progress and pre-formed panels from diverse areas of study such as the humanities, social sciences, business, science, law schools and the arts, as well as practitioners.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Movsesian at Fordham Law School: “Sharing Sacred Space In Jerusalem”

My colleague Mark will give a presentation at Fordham Law School on March 27, at 6:00 pm, as part of a panel on the subject, “Sharing Sacred Space in Jerusalem.”  Details here.  And for some of Mark’s reflections on this subject, see this post.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Michael McConnell at St. John’s Law School

The Center for Law and Religion is delighted to announce that Professor Michael McConnell (Stanford) will visit us at St. John’s Law School next Monday, March 19, at 5:30 pm.  His is the fourth session in our ongoing seminar, Colloquium in Law: Law and Religion.  Professor McConnell will reconsider Employment Division v. Smith in light of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, and he will offer us his always illuminating thoughts about the future of free exercise (those who have not read Professor McConnell’s two 1990 pieces on free exercise — one on the historical origins of free exercise and one in response to Smith — will profit from them greatly).

Academics in the New York area and beyond are welcome to attend.  Please let me know.