Photo by Ichigo121212 on Pixabay This article is part of our “Race, Religion, and Law” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. On September 6, 2018, a 26-year-old black accountant, Botham Jean, was murdered in his own apartment at the hands of a white, off-duty police officer, Amber Guyger. Mistaking Jean’s…
Low Angle Photo of Brown and Gray Cathedral during Daytime by Kris Schulze (Pexels CC) 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,…
Photo by Anna Shvets (Pixels CC) This article is part of our “Reflecting on COVID-19” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. 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…
This article is part of our “Race, Religion, and Law” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. 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…
Image of Religious Ceremony/ by Andrè Mellagi/ Flickr / This article is part of our “Race, Religion, and Law” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. 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…
Pixabay (License) 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…
Pixabay (License) 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…
Photo of red flowers by FanDeLy (Pixabay CC) This article is part of our “Religious Reflections on Forgiveness in Law” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. This essay is excerpted from Samuel J. Levine, Teshuva: A Look at Repentance, Forgiveness and Atonement in Jewish Law and Philosophy and American Legal…
Pixabay (License) 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…
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…