Religious Freedom, Realism, and Constitution-Making

Andrea Pin is full professor of comparative public law, University of Padua, and senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University.

Syria, Constitution-Making, and Frustration in the Middle East and North Africa

The debate over Syria’s new constitution is the latest iteration of several efforts to pacify the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region while securing the rule of law and human rights. The twenty-first century is marked by an impressively long series of constitutional documents that have attempted to pursue these goals, with precarious or even disappointing results.

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Border Disputes: Religious Adjudication Along the Private-Public Nexus

Ori Aronson is an associate professor of law and the deputy director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law.

In 2017, Israel’s Supreme Court was asked to decide a peculiar question: could a state court tell a religious community to shun one of its members? The case involved a husband who refused to grant his wife a Jewish religious divorce, a gett. Under Orthodox Jewish law, without her husband’s consent the woman could not remarry or have children who would be recognized as legitimate. Israeli law, by giving exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce to rabbinical courts, effectively entrenches this discriminatory rule. To mitigate its harshest consequences, state rabbinical courts have long been empowered to impose coercive civil sanctions, executed by the state’s enforcement apparatus: freezing assets, revoking drivers’ licenses, even jailing recalcitrant husbands. But these powers do not always work. In some ultra-Orthodox communities, social shame matters more than loss of liberty. So rabbinical judges began invoking traditional sanctions from medieval Jewish law—calling on neighbors to ostracize the stubborn husband until he relented.

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Standing Up for Everyone, Standing by the Vulnerable: An Interview with Brett Scharffs and Elizabeth Clark

ICLRS Director Brett G. Scharffs and Associate Director Elizabeth A. Clark discuss the concept behind and mission of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies. They share personal memories of the Center’s beginnings; recount the work of its founding director, W. Cole Durham, Jr.; and explain the Center’s activities, the sensitivities of cross-cultural dialogue, the value of patience, and the best compliment ever paid to the Center. The interview is in honor of and dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the ICLRS, which was founded 1 January 2000.

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