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…
Baby Goats Resting on the Road by Amaury Laporte (CC BY-SA 2.0). If anyone unfamiliar with Judaism were to be introduced to the concept of a kosher kitchen for the first time, they would likely raise questions. Why does the family have different dishes and cutlery for meat and dairy foods? While that may be…
Jewish Wedding by Wincenty Smokowski (1858, US-PD). Throughout the Pentateuch and subsequently in the books of the Prophets and Writings, readers are confronted with the existence of polygamous relationships – Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon, to name a mere few – but as of the eleventh century CE, Jewish men have been prohibited from taking…
Image by David Vives from Pixabay. American politics have taken increasingly surprising turns in recent years. One of the more surprising of these has been the recovery of a nineteenth-century Catholic political theory known as integralism. Its proponents reject secular governance and free institutions (lower-case “l” liberalism) in favor of “political rule that must order…
Illustration commissioned for this project by Tahira Rifath Fifty-three nations (35 Muslim-majority, 18 Muslim-minority) formally integrate shari‘a-based Muslim Family Laws (MFLs) into their domestic legal systems and enforce them through state-run (religious or civil) courts adjudicating familial disputes among their Muslim citizens. State-enforced MFLs often violate people’s fundamental rights and liberties. For example, in many…
The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and LawJohn Witte, Jr. and Rafael Domingo This text is excerpted in part from the front matter of the Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law, edited by John Witte, Jr. and Rafael Domingo (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) and is used herein with permission. This hefty new volume, over…
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. “The Role of Lawyers in Rabbinic Arbitration” Chaim…
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. “Limiting Oppression: Duress and Unconscionability in Islamic Law”…
Photo by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Law and Religion Under Pressure: A One-Year Pandemic Retrospective” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Following the murder of eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American women, news broke that the killer Robert Aaron Long had…