Series on “Chained” Women


Two distinguished scholars, one from Israel and one from the United Kingdom, join us to discuss a landmark case, ‘believed to be the first time the criminal justice system in the UK has been used on behalf of an agunah – a “chained” woman left unable to remarry according to Jewish law because her husband denies her a religious divorce.’*

Evoked in this case are issues not only of Jewish and British law, but of family law, religious autonomy, and women’s rights, with ”wide implications within the Orthodox Jewish community and potentially in other communities, when religious laws are abused . . . .’** (more…)

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Stateless and Hyperlegalized: The Indian state weaponizes paperwork

This guest post by M. Mohsin Alam Bhat is reproduced, with permission, from a January 3, 2020 article in The Baffler.  A law professor at Jindal Global Law School in Sonipat, Haryana (India), Mohsin is a 2019 alumnus of the ICLRS Religion and the Rule of Law Young Scholars Fellowship program.

On December 11, 2019, the parliament of India voted overwhelmingly to introduce a religious qualification for citizenship. The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) offers all undocumented migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan a route to naturalization, provided they are not Muslim. (more…)

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Ukrainian Autocephaly, One Year On

Elizabeth A. Clark is Associate Director, International Center for Law and Religion Studies and Regional Advisor for Europe at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University

In a moment that would have repercussions throughout the Orthodox world, on January 5, 2019, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew officially recognized a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). An act that may seem like an obscure internal jurisdictional shift to outsiders, Patriarch Bartholomew’s grant of a Tomos of autocephaly (an ecclesiastical grant of independence) reflects and contributes to the highly politicized role that religion has played in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and contains the potential to dramatically change the role of religion in Ukrainian public life for years to come. (more…)

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