Suppose that people seek confidentiality in what would otherwise be a public process—such as litigating or applying for a firearms license—because they are afraid that publicly identifying them will stigmatize them in their (or their families’) religious communities. Should the law allow them to proceed anonymously to better protect their interests and to avoid discouraging their lawsuits or applications? Or would that unduly stigmatize the religious community by branding it as improperly censorious or judgmental—or interfere with religious community members’ ability to evaluate for themselves how their coreligionists are using the courts and other government processes?

The article explores the connection between the rule of law and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion from an empirical and theoretical perspective. The author posits that the two are not merely interdependent, but that freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is foundational for embedding the rule of law because a state needs to facilitate freedom of thought, conscience, and religion to encourage the exploration of virtue to inform consensus around society’s common norms. This virtue-building role of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion gives the human right its foundational role for creating the conditions required for embedding the rule of law. This conclusion is drawn from Martin Krygier’s analysis of the sociological conditions necessary to embed the rule of law and a comparison of the worldwide rule of law, religious freedom, and happiness indexes. To support a universal approach to the human right and to underpin the identified essentiality of it, the author proposes a theoretical approach grounded in the theory of common grace; Rowan Williams’s other-regarding communal approach to rights; and the framework for plural living together proposed by Herman Dooyeweerd. The author posits that this approach could be adapted with a plural metanarrative to accommodate dialogue around virtue building and dispute resolution within societies with very different outlooks.

This article examines anti-mask protests in the United States in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, I look at the cultural (mis)appropriation of slogans by anti-mask protestors, such as “I can’t breathe” and “My body, my choice.” Noting that this is at first glance a bit of a puzzling phenomenon, I show that there is a relationship between the anti-mask protest, white Christian grievance politics, and the disintegration of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Bonnie Honig, I argue that the anti-mask protests represent a mode of opting out of public engagement, hence opting out of the practice of using rational argumentation to explain why things ought to be a certain way, as well as listening to the reasons of others. Insofar as this has become a popular mode of engagement among a significant number of Americans, it needs to be understood in the language of foregoing responsibility for others in US pluralistic democracy. Indeed, further explication of the relationship between responsibility and freedom is absolutely necessary. I maintain that opting out is ethically untenable because of the nature of interdependence with others and the necessity of adhering to the rule of law. An ethic of reciprocity properly grounds an understanding of embodied freedom, resisting the extremes of grievance politics.

The juridical status of persons nowadays tends to be discussed only in narrow contexts: civic status (citizen, alien, and various visa statuses), marital status, penal status, employment status, religious or ethnic status within colonial and postcolonial states, status of the fetus, corporate personal status, and so on. In the century and a half since Henry Maine’s 1861 treatise, Ancient Law, in which he discerned a general movement from status to contract in progressive societies, broad discussions of status as a general feature of law are few, so a renewed comprehensive approach to the issue remains a desideratum. This symposium, which has its origins in an interdisciplinary conference held in November 2019 at Washington and Lee University School of Law, is a step in that direction. The articles and essay gathered here illuminate the multifarious ways in which juridical status of persons overlaps with religious conceptions of persona and status. They provide grounds for seeing the religious component as distinctive because of the uniquely privileged authority attributed to divinely mandated status distinctions and the urgency of claims to religious rights. They also show how a juridical status can straddle law and religion, and how legal institutions handle such hybrid forms of status.

A curious list from the Mishnah lists seven labors that a woman does for her husband. The juxtaposition of these seven tasks in a list creates a hierarchy among them, which dictates the order in which the performance of a task is transferred to an enslaved woman as the size of the woman’s dowry increases. Scholars read this text to understand how wealth shapes a woman’s labor obligations, but they have taken the form and contents of the list as a given. This article argues that the list establishes the category of wives’ work in rabbinic literature and defines it as work that is performed interchangeably by the wife or enslaved women. The form of the list can be compared to other lists within the Mishnah as well as lists of housework in contemporary traditions. These comparisons allow for a more critical stance toward the interplay of slavery and status in the Mishnah. The Mishnah’s framing of a wife’s work as interchangeable belies how the individual tasks were embedded in broader social, economic, and technological transformations.

In this article, we explore the status of Samaritans in early modern Ottoman Damascus through a focus on a particular firman—a sultanic legal decree. The firman orders that Samaritans—a religious group that traces its origins to ancient Israel but differs from Jews in several aspects—are not to be employed as clerks by Ottoman authorities. We argue that the firman indicates Ottoman officials engaged in religious status management despite the lack of legal terminology for minority in the document. The significance of the firman regarding conceptualizing status, we suggest, is that it points to an alternative model of minoritization that is not based in modern European legal approaches to religious minority status and law but which accounts for people’s experiences of minority status before modernity.

A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed that having specific legal rights did not perforce endow one with constitutional rights. Nevertheless, a handful of recent and high-profile disputes concerning Hindu temple deities and the growing influence of Hindu nationalist politics together suggest that the issue of deities’ rights is far from a settled matter. This article argues that declining to recognize deities’ constitutional rights accurately reflects dueling commitments in the Indian Constitution.

This essay examines the claims-making practices of conservative evangelical Protestants in England and Satmar Hasidim in the United States, communities marginal to two contingents of leftist academic discourse today: scholars who see liberation as an anti-statist project and others who imagine religious diversity as a common good facilitated by the state. The author suggests that one way forward in the critical study of law and religion is to examine communities with political commitments that differ from our own—who shape their worlds alongside and through the state yet are unconcerned about a common democratic future. By showing that no liberal (statist) or liberatory (anti-statist) framework holds either the Satmar or evangelical Christian legal claims, the author identifies generative problems for thought that challenge current approaches to understanding religion-state entanglement in the contemporary world.