Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, Washington, DC by G. Edward Johnson (CC BY 4.0). At a Nashville rally in 2015, Donald Trump declared that mass shootings like one that had recently occurred at an Oregon community college would never happen if teachers were armed and able to defend themselves and their students. He went on to…
Sunset over Pangkor Island, Malaysia (CC0 1.0). Insurance forms the foundation of modern economies, transforming uncertainty into manageable obligations, allocating risk, and stabilizing market. Yet conventional insurance, built on secular commercial frameworks, often clashes with Islamic legal and ethical norms. In many, Muslim-majority societies, however, conventional insurance has religious concerns. Classical jurisprudence prohibits riba (interest),…
Anasuya Feeding the Hindu Trinity, painting on the wall of the Krishna-Sudama Temple of Porbandar (CC0 1.0). In The Illusion of the Repugnant Client: Hindu Ethics in American Legal Practice, I argued that the concept of an inherently repugnant client is incoherent from a dharmic perspective, that the Hindu-American lawyer’s svadharma demands zealous representation of…
Aerial view of the House of the Good Shepherd via Denver Public Library (Public Domain). When the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project endeavored to study the “oldest” women’s prison in the United States they pointed not only to the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls—the oldest state penitentiary built exclusively for women—but the Home of the…
Bangly Regency, Bali, Indonesia by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas (CC BY-SA 3.0). Indonesia’s constitutional order reflects one of the most ambitious contemporary efforts to govern religious diversity through law. As an archipelagic state encompassing over 17,000 islands and hundreds of ethnoreligious communities, Indonesia has long confronted the institutional challenge of recognizing religious authority within a plural legal…
Supreme Court of Pakistan by Guilhem Vellut (CC BY 2.0). The pursuit of justice is often described as a journey toward truth, yet in the context of Pakistan’s legal landscape, that journey is frequently stalled by the heavy burdens of delay, exorbitant costs, and procedural complexity. As the backlog of cases in the superior and…
Photo of Santa Muerte iconography. Photo taken by author. In March 2009, Mexican soldiers razed more than forty public shrines to Santa Muerte in Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana, pulverizing cement and plaster images of La Huesuda under the treads of military bulldozers. The spectacular demolitions—repeated in subsequent years, including in Coahuila under President Enrique Peña…
Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan by King Elliot (CC BY-SA 4.0). Since its founding in 1947, Pakistan’s trajectory on women’s rights has been marked by a persistent tension between constitutional promises of equality and periods of legal ambiguity. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan affirms women’s equal status before the law, political participation, and…
New York City Skyline by Janusz Sobolewski (CC BY 2.0). Recently, a number of us on staff at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, ranging from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, had the occasion to take stock of different generations and their perspectives on human rights. Baby Boomers are old enough to…
The West Virginia State Capitol Building by O Palsson (CC BY 2.0). Since 2020, a foster family from West Virginia fostered, and eventually adopted, three girls. In 2023, the girls’ newborn biological brother, M.B., was immediately placed with the foster family. Notably, the foster family are members of an Old Order Amish community. M.B.’s guardian ad…