Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- Pennsylvania lawmakers are ready to decide whether the criminal statute of limitations should be eliminated and the windows lengthened to file lawsuits against the priests named in last week’s grand jury report detailing child sex abuse within the state’s Catholic dioceses.
- Parents of Maine schoolchildren sued the state challenging a school choice funding law that precludes them from using the funding to send their children to religious schools.
- Protestant denominations have denounced the Doctrine of Discovery—a claim of right to the lands of indigenous peoples which dates back to the fifteenth century.
- The D.C. Circuit remanded a case about anti-Muslim advertisements on the D.C. Metro for the lower court to decide whether the Metro’s restrictions are reasonable.
- A Christian group opposes Arkansas’s proposed tort reforms due to the limitation of damage awards in lawsuits, which it believes places an arbitrary value on human life.
- A federal magistrate judge ordered nuclear protesters—who claim their conduct is an exercise of their Catholic faith—and federal prosecutors to file more relevant arguments to the protesters’ Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) defense.
The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Little has previously been written about the faith of the great judges who framed and developed the English common law over centuries, but this unique volume explores how their beliefs were reflected in their judicial functions. This comparative study, embracing ten centuries of English law, draws some remarkable conclusions as to how Christianity shaped the views of lawyers and judges. Adopting a long historical perspective, this volume also explores the lives of judges whose practice in or conception of law helped to shape the Church, its law or the articulation of its doctrine.
influence of religion within medieval society. Religion in the Middle Ages was not monolithic. Medieval religion and the Latin Church are not synonymous. While theology and liturgy are important, an examination of animal trials, gargoyles, last judgments, various aspects of the medieval underworld, and the quest for salvation illuminate lesser known dimensions of religion in the Middle Ages. Several themes run throughout the book including visual culture, heresy and heretics, law and legal procedure, along with sexuality and an awareness of mentalities and anxieties. Although an expanse of 800 years has passed, the remains of those other Middle Ages can be seen today, forcing us to reassess our evaluations of this alluring and often overlooked past.
IDLO jointly with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation will organize a half-day conference on “Freedom of Religion or Belief: Promoting Peaceful Coexistence Through Human Rights” to discuss the role of the rule of law in enabling the right to freedom of religion or belief.
the same time, it also questions the thesis that as societies become more modern, they also become less religious.
request of their creditors. Tyler Lange analyzes over 11,000 excommunications between 1380 and 1530 in order to explore the forms, rhythms, and cultural significance of the practice. Three case studies demonstrate how excommunication for debt facilitated minor transactions in an age of scarce small-denomination coinage and how interest-free loans and sales credits could be viewed as encouraging the relations of charitable exchange that were supposed to exist between members of Christ’s body. Lange also demonstrates how from 1500 or so believers gradually turned away from the practice and towards secular courts, at the same time as they retained the moralized, economically irrational conception of indebtedness we have yet to shake. The demand-driven rise and fall of excommunication for debt reveals how believers began to reshape the institutional Church well before Martin Luther posted his theses.
increasingly pluralistic and complex forms? In Reconsidering Religion, Law, and Democracy the authors study the interaction and negotiations between religious organizations and religious citizens on the one hand, and the state, the judicial system, the media, and secular citizens on the other.
delves into the theoretical and practical studies of al-Qawaid al-Fiqhiyyah in Islamic legal theory. It elucidates the importance of this concept in the application of Islamic law and demonstrates how the concept relates to the objectives of Islamic law (maqāṣid al-Sharī‘ah), generally. Included in this examination are the following maxims: al-Umūr bi-Maqāṣidihā (“Matters shall be Judged by their Objectives”); al-Yaqīn lā Yazūl bi-sh-Shakk (“Certainty Cannot be Overruled by Doubt”); al-Mashaqqa Tajlib at-Taysīr (“Hardship begets Facility”); Lā Ḍarar wa-lā Ḍirār (“No Injury or Harm shall be Inflicted or Reciprocated”); and al-ʿĀda Muḥakkama (“Custom is Authoritative”).