Courtroom Bench Gavel by Patrick Feller (CC BY 2.0). A new memorandum from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), issued July 28, 2025, has put the spotlight on religious expression in federal workplaces. OPM Director Scott Kupor’s guidance explicitly affirms that federal employees “may seek to ‘persuade others of the correctness of their own…
Jewish Law Meets International LawMichael J. Broyde and Yehonatán Elazar-De Mota The following is an introduction to Michael J. Broyde and Yehonatán Elazar-De Mota’s new book, Jewish Law and International Law: Sovereignty and Exogenous Authority in a Transnational World (Oxford, 2025). In today’s interconnected world, legal traditions are constantly interacting across borders. Nations craft treaties…
Nuremburg Trials Protocols by David Shay (CC BY 3.0 DEED) Prologue Rabbi Dr. Emanuel Rackman (b. 1910, d. 2008) was a unique figure in the Orthodox Jewish community. Besides his well-known intellectual brilliance, he was involved with nearly every important Orthodox organization in America for many decades and then moved to Israel to be the…
“Artificial Intelligence” from Pixabay (License) This essay is the third installment of a three-part series by the author on Jewish law and AI. This third and final installment is a compilation of general resources on law and AI at the time of this writing in June 2023. Read the first and second installments in this…
“Artificial Intelligence” from Pixabay (License) This essay is the second installment of a three-part series by the author on this topic. Read the first and third installments in this series. I suspect that this field of AI reasoning is a mix between the ability of the engine to process and the available data it has…
“Artificial Intelligence” from Pixabay (License) This essay is the first installment of a three-part series by the author on this topic. Read the second and third installments in this series. In a forthcoming article, “May a Kohen in a Same Sex Relationship Duchen,” I analyze whether a man in a same-sex relationship may engage in…
Image: Wedding celebration, Jerusalem 1981 / Drkup(IMJ) / CC BY-SA 4.0 This article is part of our “Clothed in Religion: Law and Religious Attire/Garb” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. One of the most interesting social developments in Jewish legal and cultural interactions with Western society is the sheitel,…
Picture by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Note: This work is a profoundly revised version intended to be accessible to a secular audience of a…
Photo of Manhattan by wiggijo on Pixabay (CC0) A virtual conference sponsored by Canopy Forum of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory (CSLR) featuring scholars, experts and practitioners on the topic of religious arbitration. View the full video and browse all essays here. “There is no First Amendment Exemption in Contracts…
Image by Alexa from Pixabay. A number of years ago, I wrote an article addressing celebrating Thanksgiving according to Jewish law, which was published in Canopy Forum last year. In that article, I noted that most Jewish law authorities accept that: (1) Thanksgiving is an American holiday with secular origins, (2) While some people might celebrate…