After its initial founding by the Council on Religion and Law at Harvard, the Journal of Law and Religion had its first life at Hamline University School of Law beginning in 1983. This essay is a history of its second life—from 1987/1988 to 2013—describing the vision and the people who pursued that vision through the journal in those years and some of the roundtables and symposia it published.

Of all the principles in classical Jewish law that stand out from a comparative legal perspective perhaps none is more notable than the ban on self-incrimination in criminal procedures. Contrary to the most basic evidentiary assumptions of other ancient legal systems, this principle differs fundamentally from the right to remain silent that is part of both early modern and modern legal systems. Only rabbinic jurisprudence incorporates an outright exclusion of criminal confessions. Despite receiving much scholarly attention over the centuries, this principle’s fundamental justification relating to the rule of law and the public pursuit of justice has gone unnoticed. This article explores this salient jurisprudential perspective, and sheds new light on this principle by contrasting the Jewish legal approach with the primary modes of criminal adjudication that were adopted in the West. What emerges from this comparative analysis is that this seemingly anomalous principle actually reveals much about the core commitments and values of Jewish law. These, in turn, have substantial implications for certain contemporary legal practices and dilemmas.

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.

The decisionistic strand in Jewish legal philosophy is often neglected by scholars focused on the more common rational explanations for Jewish law. This article brings attention to decisionism in Jewish legal thought by analyzing the legal philosophy of Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the founder of the Habad Hasidic movement. The author uses the legal and political thought of Carl Schmitt—arguably modernity’s most influential decisionist—to help elucidate Shneur Zalman’s decisionistic legal thought and thereby put into sharper focus an otherwise underappreciated current in Jewish legal philosophy.

This article makes the counterintuitive argument that the millennia-old approach of Jewish law to regulating surveillance, protecting communications, and governing collection and use of information offers important frameworks for protecting privacy in an age of big data and pervasive surveillance. The modern approach to privacy has not succeeded. Notions of individual “rights to be let alone” and “informational self-determination” offer little defense against rampant data collection and aggregation. The substantive promise of a “fundamental human right” of privacy has largely been reduced to illusory procedural safeguards of “notice” and “consent”—manipulable protections by which individuals “agree” to privacy terms with little understanding of the bargain and little power to opt out. Judaism, on the other hand, views privacy as a societal obligation and employs categorical behavioral and architectural mandates that bind all of society's members. It limits waiver of these rules and rejects both technological capacity and the related notion of “expectations” as determinants of privacy's content. It assumes the absence of anonymity and does not depend on the confidentiality of information or behavior, whether knowledge is later used or shared, or whether the privacy subject can show concrete personal harm. When certain types of sensitive information are publicly known or cannot help but be visible, Jewish law still provides rules against their use. Jewish law offers a language that can guide policy debates. It suggests a move from individual control over information as the mechanism for shaping privacy's meaning and enforcement, to a regime of substantive obligations—personal and organizational—to protect privacy. It recognizes the interconnected nature of human interests and comprehends the totality of the harm that pervasive surveillance wreaks on individuals and social relations. It offers a conceptual basis for extending traditional privacy protections to online spaces and new data uses. And it provides a language of dignity that recognizes unequal bargaining power, rejects the aggregation and use of information to create confining personal narratives and judgments, and demands equal protection for all humans.

This article explores one tumultuous encounter between a religious legal tradition and the modern principle of equality—an encounter that also has the potential to shed light on a much wider cluster of questions. The author tracks the ways that the responsa written by prominent Conservative rabbis on the subject of female rabbinic ordination and gender equality implicitly (but unambiguously) reflect the push toward increased equality that weighed on the movement's trajectory, showing that the debate about the ordination of female rabbis reveals two principal trends in Conservative legal rulings, which differ in their responses to the challenge of egalitarianism and their visions of the law, and notes two outlier responsa that cannot be neatly classified within either trend. The author then examines the deep-seated historical, ideational, and sociological processes concurrent with the rise of what some have called the egalitarian age, which have produced these diverging responses and visions, and it determines an appropriate framework to understand them. The author shows that the fight for increased gender equality is situated within an intricate social context that imbues it with meaning and shapes its outcomes and modes of expression. In concluding, the author suggests applying the insights gained in the course of the analysis to other circumstances in which gender egalitarianism clashes with religious tradition. The framework by which the ordination of women in the Conservative movement is analyzed also proves useful, mutatis mutandis, in understanding and comparing the responses of other faith communities as they deal with challenges caused by the egalitarian age.

In this article, the authors examine how the potential success of head/body transplantation raises questions as to how halakha—Jewish law and jurisprudence—might draw the line between determining whether a person is dead or alive. In presenting the primary Talmudic passages that refer to determination of life and death, and their discussion among halakhists and halakhic decisors, the authors show how the halakha might determine the demarcation between life and death as it applies to head/body transplants or potentially other innovations in medical technology.