This article explores resources within the Christian theological tradition that recognize happiness in earthly life while also preparing Christians for ultimate happiness through union with God. Two resources explored in the article are the appreciation of happiness in Jesus's ministry and its engagement with Greek philosophy. After exploring these resources, the article turns to Aelred of Rievaulx, the great medieval theologian, to investigate how moral virtue, transcendent happiness, and earthly pleasure are harmonious parts of a holistic Christian vision of happiness. Finally, after examining Aelred's contribution, the article considers how this integrated view of happiness can help us to think through the problems of happiness in our lives today.

Critics argue that the politics of religious rights creates the problem of religious minorities instead of resolving it. The history of debate over conversion in India reveals that appeals to religious freedom can obscure and even suppress struggles against inequality and injustice.

The way in which Islamic courts and laws are developed and how religious legal apparatuses shape the relations between—and within—religious communities has been a common source of debate among scholars. This article analyzes the growing institutional power and authority of Islamic courts and judges in Malaysia since the late 1980s to contribute to this theoretical debate. Specifically, it compares two critical phases of institutional development of Islamic courts in Malaysia's largely secular judicial system: the first under the premiership of Mahathir Mohamad before the dismissal of his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim (1980–1998), and the second under the post-reformasi (reform) period (1999–present). Original data gathered at the Jabatan Kehakiman Syariah Malaysia (Department of Syariah Judiciary Malaysia) and other government and legal agencies, fieldwork, and semistructured interviews with Islamic and civil court officials both at the federal and state levels document the institutional expansion and administrative independence that the Islamic courts and judges have successively gained in relation to their civil counterparts. It is argued that the gradual bureaucratization of Islamic courts can best be explained with reference to the interests—and strategic coalitions—of political and religious elites within the majority community to sustain a dominant regime and majoritarian rule based on communal identity.

Because our modern world system emerged within world-wide contexts, we must consider how founding relationships that established it reflect global interconnectedness of their own era. Douglas Sturm has written, “History is a process of new formations. What we are and what we shall become are not givens. They are results of many relations in which we are engaged and whose character we affect, in however small a degree, by the manner of our participation.” Too often this relational perspective has been ignored in propounding origins and fundamental relationships of our modern world. For over five hundred years, for example, Eurocentrism has betrayed indebtedness to Renaissance hubris. Further, contemporary memories of our relational past are laced with policies and perspectives of forebears who constituted nation states. These processes entailed “inventing traditions” post facto, while also vesting collective memories with [hi]stories on behalf of national dignity and imperial stature. Even as false memories have been used for socializing children into citizens, and for motivating troops and voters, they also render indispensable historical understandings problematical. Sometimes there are hints of such fabrications in paradoxical impressions. Edward Lucie-Smith muses: “Granted that piracy is really no more than robbery at sea, how did the crime come to acquire the aura of sinister glamour that still clings to it, an aura which sets the pirate apart from other and more commonplace malefactors?” Piracy's “aura of sinister glamour” is not confined to tropes like Blackbeard, the Jolly Roger, or Long John Silver. “Piracy” has clouded Asian history and rationalized European incursions, at least since the Portuguese captured the fabulous port city of Melaka in 1511.

The Mormon cases present a fascinating study of diversity and conformity in the United States in the nineteenth century. From their beginning the Mormons were a gathered people. Almost immediately, from their origins in New York, the Mormons challenged the legal systems in the nation and the states where they resided to protect or at least tolerate their idiosyncracies. Mormon belief and practice came to include communal economics, theocratic government, and most challenging and offensive of all to the larger national community, a radically different marital and social practice—polygamous marriage.

Mormon history began in New York and continued briefly in Ohio where Mormons first gathered. Mormons experienced their most savage suppression in Missouri, where the Governor, Lilburn Boggs, finally issued an extermination order and the “Mormon war” finally saw Mormons driven into Illinois to seek refuge and a new community. After the community initially welcomed Mormon refugees, the abrasiveness of a people who were so incapable of assimilation into the existing society led to conflict again, culminating in the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and his brother Hyrum. The Mormon exodus to the Great Basin of the American West followed, under the direction of Brigham Young, one of this nation's leading colonizers. But the story of free exercise of religion among the Mormons in nineteenth century America had just begun.

The highly publicized cases of Indiana's Infant Doe, Tennessee's Pamela Hamilton, New York's Baby Jane Doe, and California's Elizabeth Bouvia raise a series of questions about the proper relations of legal, medical, and moral expertise in our society which are being forced upon us with increasing urgency. Indeed, the daily papers, radio, and television news and special reports flood us with instances of pressing moral dilemmas being played out in courtrooms before bevies of expert witnesses on both sides of issues which only a generation ago would have been virtually unheard of (e.g., genetic counseling and engineering, organ donation and transplantation, the use and abuse of life-sustaining technologies, and so forth). In this article I wish to explore several of the legal, medical, and moral ambiguities surrounding these proceedings by focusing on the first two cases mentioned above.

Over the years, law has been denned variously as a “brooding omnipresence in the sky,” the decree of a sovereign, the mores of human experience, the practical realization of truth and justice, what operates when there is peace and order. From a societal perspective, all of these have a ring of truth. When one does not think in terms of “me” but in terms of “we,” then law as social order makes sense. But the individual does not comprehend the law so abstractly. Law is a world of violence, death, pain, and suffering imposed on those who are loved, hated, respected, feared, scorned, and pitied. For those who are forced to bend to the coercion of the law, law is not so vague a concept as ‘truth’, ‘justice’, ‘tradition’, ‘conventional morality’, ‘mores’. Law is pain. It is profound to the extent violence and death are profound. It is abstract to the extent pain is an abstraction. It is neutral as coercion and suffering strike us as neutral. Law, for those who make it and for those who are subject to it, is as objective and impartial an enterprise as law's violence allows. As violence is world destroying, law is deobjectified. It remains impersonal only for those who are removed from it. But for those who live it and are therefore touched by its coercion, the meaning of otherwise abstract impersonal principles is colored by the experience of law's violence.

Modern consumer credit law is a large and complex body of law. Underneath the complexity, however, is a simple goal: to ensure that consumers are treated fairly and to prevent, or at least to redress, overreaching and abuse by creditors. To this extent, modern consumer law can be said to reflect a felt sense of societal responsibility to a particularly vulnerable group.

We tend to think of consumer credit law as a modern phenomenon; and indeed, the vast majority of consumer credit laws in this country have appeared since the late 1960s. But our generation did not invent consumer protection law; many of our modern rules have antecedents which date back for centuries. Indeed, consumer credit transactions are as old as civilization, and even the earliest societies regulated at least some lending and credit practices.

Ancient Israel was no exception; its legal codes contained many rules on lending practices. While these rules were not nearly as complex as our modern rules, they did address a remarkably wide range of issues which we would identify today as consumer protection issues. As part of a larger body of humanitarian laws and customs designed to protect against undue hardship, the rules on credit practices were similar in principle to our modern consumer laws in that they reflected a sense of responsibility toward the poor and most vulnerable members of society.

Since 1533 archbishops of Canterbury have conferred academic degrees by virtue of the power invested in them by the Ecclesiastical Licences Act 1533-1534, also known as the Peter's Pence Act. Legally these so-called Lambeth degrees, named after the principal residence of the archbishop, survive as an aspect of the medieval papal authority to grant dispensations. This is, in individual cases of hardship, the see of Rome might exercise the jurisdiction vested in him as patriarch of the west—though not necessarily in other patriarchs—to confer upon an appropriate recipient the academic degree which he would have received but for some impediment.

But properly speaking, these degrees were not just an exercise of papal dispensation, they also sometimes had the character of a grant of a privilege. For example, the papacy might confer a degree upon a recipient to enable that person to hold an office that the canon law, or a specific institutional rule, limited to graduates. The power claimed and exercised by the papacy to confer the status of graduate to someone who had not earned it in the traditional way was never limited solely to true dispensations, but always included positive privilege as papal degrees granted for political reasons clearly illustrate.

You don't have to be a postmodernist—and I am not—to take the view that the reading of ancient texts by legal historians cannot be “innocent.” All meaning is constructed: texts do not “make sense;” we attribute sense to them. And the sense we attribute is in part a function of the resources we bring to that process. Necessarily, we bring culturally contingent assumptions. We may not be able to rid ourselves of such assumptions, and restore ourselves to that state of innocence which traditionally has been identified with “objectivity.” But we can seek to lay bare those assumptions to the maximum possible degree, so that we can subject them to some process of evaluation (a process, no doubt, whose own assumptions should be subjected, equally, to critical examination).

If we ask what kind of assumptions the legal historian brings to ancient texts, the most ready answer would, no doubt, be assumptions regarding typical models of legal development. We can certainly identify the operation of assumptions of this kind in the modern literature relating to biblical law. The argument of this paper, however, will be that it is not sufficient to confine ourselves, for this purpose, to “models of legal development.” That very notion encompasses more general issues—what is law? what is development?—which themselves fall for examination.

The recent three-hour program on “Professional Responsibility and the Religious Traditions” at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (“AALS”), sponsored by the Section on Professional Responsibility and co-sponsored by the Section on Law and Religion, represents a milepost in the history of the religious lawyering movement and offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on that history. In 1998, only eight years ago, one of us defined the religious lawyering movement as “an emerging force” in legal ethics. In that short time, the movement has expanded dramatically and has received greater attention within the academy and the bar. It has developed the first institutional vehicles for disseminating and promoting conversations about religious lawyering, both among lawyers of the same faith and among lawyers of different faith traditions. Now the religious lawyering movement is increasingly confronting more complex and more difficult religious, legal and ethical issues; and is extending the religious lawyering conversation internationally.

Former President Carter's Presidential Proclamation ordering the resumption of registration for a possible draft provoked once again a question that has recurred throughout the history of the American republic: what right, if any, do persons conscientiously unable to participate in a military enterprise hav to be exempted from laws that would otherwise requir them to do so?

The question, at its profoundest level, touches on difficult issues of political and legal philosophy. On the one hand, war is the ultima ratio regnum. The presumption is that a nation will not mobilize its people for military effort unless vital interests are at stake and that the people are bound to support that effort with their energies and lives.

In the six decades since it began adjudicating issues involving religion and K-12 education, the United States Supreme Court has issued numerous opinions on various aspects of that relationship. Several of the Court's viewpoints have changed over time. It explicitly reversed itself on the constitutionality of using publicly-paid specialists in parochial schools, and dramatically changed its perspective on public funds flowing to those institutions. But the Court has never wavered on issues regarding religious activities in public schools—it has struck down every policy or program it has chosen to review. No opinion was unanimous, and rationales changed. But no result has diverged from the Court's original perspective that the Establishment Clause's brightest line ran just outside the public school grounds.

This piece begins with first doctrinal, then policy reviews of the Court's nine school prayer decisions. Parts I and II analyze the decisions as constitutional doctrine, dividing them along parallel lines of time and quality. In Part I, I show that the holdings and rationales of the Court's early school prayer decisions are both sound and commendable as constitutional doctrine. Part II takes a longer look at the remaining later decisions however, and reveals a struggling Court often relying on specious, fabricated or a priori reasoning to reach the apparently inevitable, but questionable, conclusion of unconstitutionality. Part III takes up the effects of the Court's decisions on social and political policy. I argue that the early decisions, though controversial, freed America from a past of sectarian domination, while the later decisions helped sow the seeds of several related and unhappy developments, especially ones promoting the very religious divisions they purported to guard against.

Hidden in plain sight in hundreds of judicial opinions is an extraordinary principle—love your neighbor as yourself. At first blush the idea of its application to our legal relations seems odd: This is a matter of morality, not legality. But the biblical command to love neighbor as self has exerted an important influence upon the decisions of American courts. While more frequently excluded from application, the love command has found expression in a wide range of cases. From criminal to civil procedure, from torts to contracts, from employment to family disputes, neighbor-love has been a vital part of American jurisprudence.

This article will highlight the application of the love command to legal disputes by courts, as well as provide a brief overview of the biblical texts and scholarly legal commentary dealing with the love command. Its main purpose is descriptive—pointing out what we haven't noticed—but it is also normative—we have missed something important—neighbor-love is not out of place in the courtroom. It has been, and should continue to be, applied to legal relationships by our courts.

During 2006, controversies concerning Shari‘a or Islamic law seemed to dominate media reports. From cartoons to apostasy trials, Shari‘a was deemed to be at the core of controversies that attained international notoriety. Furthermore, Shari‘a was implicitly invoked by the Pope in his now infamous speech at Regensberg, in which he referred to the prophet Muhammad and an early Muslim jurist in order to define Europe as Christian and contrary to all that is Islamic. The Shari‘a-related events of 2006 raised fundamental questions not just about what Shari‘a is, but more fundamentally about the place of Muslims and their religious tradition in the international system. This article attempts to survey the above Shari‘a-related events from 2006 in order to illustrate how references to Shari‘a, whether by Muslims or non-Muslims, were embedded within a larger discourse on identity, community, and difference.

This survey will not provide an in-depth analysis and critique of the Shari‘a doctrines invoked in each case, as that would be beyond its scope. Rather, this article is intended to review the events in light of how “Shari‘a” was characterized, used, and positioned within a larger legal and political discourse. All of them illuminate similar problems of definition and identity that will generally arise in any critical discussion of Shari‘a in the modern day. Shari‘a has arguably become more than a system of legal rules that can be subjected to critical legal scrutiny. Rather, it is also a symbol of political identity, such that any suggestion of legal reform may create political fall out amongst those committed to certain conceptions of identity, political and otherwise. The controversies concerning Shari‘a in 2006 arguably had less to do with legal doctrine, and more to do with how “Shari‘a” can be used and manipulated to facilitate political ends concerning the definition of identity and thereby the separation (and even marginalization) of communities.

The twelfth century canon lawyer Gratian once wrote “Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him you have killed him.” If Gratian were alive today, he might take a look at the current state of global health and say, “Succor the woman dying of disease, because if you have not helped her you have killed her.” Both of these statements express an ethical obligation: if I have food, and someone else who is hungry does not, I am obligated to share my food. Likewise, if I have medicine, and someone else who is sick does not, I am obligated to share my medicine.

Unfortunately, with regard to medicines and other essential products, modern institutions of intellectual property often fail to enforce or even recognize such ethical obligations. In some ways, these institutions uphold an even harsher attitude toward intellectual property than other types of property. With food, even if the hungry person receives no bread, he is still permitted to produce his own. With medicines, medical technologies, and other types of goods that are protected by institutions of intellectual property, the law can and often does prevent the sick person from producing her own.

Abortion, along with same-sex unions, is perhaps one of the world's most polarizing issues today. Laws on abortion vary across different jurisdictions, from prohibiting abortion under all circumstances to freely allowing it without restriction as to reason. Unlike rights such as freedom from torture or of speech, failure to recognize abortion rights is not necessarily the product of illiberal governments known to abuse human rights, nor is allowing abortion indicative of a good human rights record. Extensive rights to terminate a pregnancy may be symptomatic of a government's policy for population control, as in the case of China, or it may be an expression of the liberal philosophy of autonomy, as in the case of Canada.

Welcome back to the afternoon session. We would now like to entertain questions from the audience, as well as questions from our scholars.

Mr. Neuhaus referred to Dr. King in his remarks, but in a sense the question is to the whole panel. I wonder, since the emphasis was on civil rights, why there was not a bit more inquiry into the black religious experience as a foundation for civil rights. And, specifically, I wonder why there was not more inquiry into the role of 19th century black clergy, both antebellum and post-civil-war, in forming a moral consensus that led to such things as the passage of the civil rights act of 1975 and subsequent concern for civil rights legislation and some of the decisions of the Supreme Court which addressed those concerns. It seems to me that Martin Luther King is a relatively late figure to cite as someone who articulates the black perspective on religion and civil rights. He is, in some ways, the culmination of a long tradition, and I find that a singular omission, frankly, given the focus of the symposium.

It is easy to be depressed about the state of law these days. As the voters have become increasingly fearful and hateful, legislators and judges have made our law less generous and honorable. The death penalty has been reintroduced and corners have been cut in procedural protections to speed it along. The honorable basis of the exclusionary rule—the unwillingness of judges to countenance wrong-doing—has been abandoned. Legal aid for the poor has been cut back. The steam has gone out of civil rights enforcement. There no longer seems to be a vision among lawyers that law can be a source of nourishment for society. The positivist vision of law—the will of the strong—dominates legal thinking. Even the liberals, “burnt-out” and cynical in the light of legal realism, do not think of law as special.