“Vatican Criminal Reforms Ignore Glaring Problems Even as Jurisdiction Expands Worldwide” Matthew P. Cavedon On February 16, Pope Francis announced changes to the Vatican’s criminal code. These alter court procedures to protect a few defense rights and make punishment more merciful. They come alongside recent expansions in the Vatican’s criminal jurisdiction, which has gone almost…
This article is part of our “What’s Wrong with Rights?” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Contemporary discussions of rights tend to be about where to place a caesura between acceptable and unacceptable kinds of rights. This caesura is primarily a matter of valuation, but it can also be…
The New Age of Rights In the 1990s, the European Union (EU) seemed to be done. The Old Continent was pacified. Soviet imperialism had melted away. European dictatorships — from Portugal to Spain, from Greece to Romania — had ended. European citizens could travel from Italy to the Netherlands, from Portugal to Germany, without border…
“Which King’s Bay? Religion against the Rules in Nuclear Civil Disobedience” Matthew P. Cavedon It is commonplace to understand religion as a building block of identity. We define our personalities in light of any number of characteristics – our religion, nationality, politics, ethnicity, sex, disabilities, and so on. It is also commonplace, nowadays, to say…
This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. We are shocked. Morally outraged. How could a U.S. president, touting “law and order,” incite a blatant attack on “American democracy” and “the rule of law”? Commentators…
This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “Onward, Christian soldiers!Marching as to war,With the cross of Jesus Going on before.” Though this began as a song for a children’s processional, it also provides an…
This article is part of our “What’s Wrong with Rights?” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Nigel Biggar’s publications are predictable, but never uninteresting: predictable in that he is unashamedly a conservative moral philosopher who self-defines as a professional Christian ethicist, a description which seems to imply that mere…
“Subjective Beliefs, Social Judgments, and Witch Killers” Matthew P. Cavedon In a 1992 abortion decision, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court held: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Consider…
Constitutional Theology is the intersection of theology with constitutional theory. Constitutional Theology recognizes that the constitutional design will reflect society’s beliefs about the nature of humanity or those who rule. At the same time, it acknowledges that, if the constitutional system is to work, a faith’s interactions with the larger society must echo the constitutional…
This article is part of our “What’s Wrong with Rights?” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. What’s Wrong with Rights is a superb book. If there is one subject that lends itself to interdisciplinary research, it is that of human rights. To the extent that lawyers have ever been…