The Civil Partnership Act 2004 (“the 2004 Act”) was described by the then Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice as an “important and groundbreaking piece of legislation,” as well as “the greatest advance towards equality for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people for many years.” While characterized as “totally distinct from marriage,” the legislation…
Challenging times can bring out the very best in people, but these times also seem to prompt far less commendable actions by others. There are always those happy and eager to take advantage of a crisis, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Alongside stories of generosity and courage, there are reports of price…
This article is adapted from the authors’ forthcoming book: Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (2020) from Cambridge University Press. By the time the English settled Virginia in the early seventeenth century, the enslavement of Africans had already spread across the New World. Yet the Virginia colonists lacked the…
Last August, DECRADI (a specialized police force in Rio de Janeiro that handles crimes of religious and racial intolerance) announced that since the beginning of 2019, Evangelized drug traffickers had threatened, invaded, deprecated or completely destroyed at least 200 hundred Afro-Brazilian religious temples (“terreiros”). In one March 2019 incident, for example, traffickers jumped over the…
An earlier Spanish-language version of this essay was recently published on CNN en Español. Recently, the Catholic Church has begun an internal conversation about ordaining married men as priests. This move would mark a significant change from what has been the settled policy of the Latin Church for a thousand years, under which priests are…
Natural law and human rights language is directly connected to discussions about human nature. Public rhetoric describing specific communities often shapes our discussions about the way natural law and human rights are applied to those communities. Given the current U.S. presidential administration’s public rhetoric about Latinx and undocumented communities, it is important to examine the…
This essay is excerpted from Samuel J. Levine, Teshuva: A Look at Repentance, Forgiveness and Atonement in Jewish Law and Philosophy and American Legal Thought, 27 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1677 (2000), reprinted in 2 Samuel J. Levine, Jewish Law and American Law: A Comparative Study 205 (2018). Introduction In his contribution to an important UCLA Law…
During a speech at the United Nations on September 23, 2019, President Trump stated that “protecting religious freedom is one of my highest priorities.” This claim, however, has some advocates of threatened religious minorities crying foul. They argue that Trump has not made good on his promise, citing his ever-shrinking limit on the yearly number…
Parliament of the World’s Religions, Chicago, United States, 1893. Wikimedia. Part three of this series on interfaith dialogue focuses on religious literacy. Religious illiteracy is a widespread phenomenon and can seriously hamper attempts to engage in at least some forms of interfaith dialogue. Notably, this problem is not exclusively one of interfaith illiteracy as many…
Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash From a Catholic perspective, law, justice, mercy, and forgiveness ultimately converge in God, who is the ultimate source of law and combines justice, mercy, and forgiveness in his dealings with human beings. The classic Catholic definition of law comes from Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) who said that law “is nothing else than…