Constitutional Court of South Korea by Wei-Te Wong (CC BY-SA 2.0) Within five years, three of Asia’s major democracies stopped treating adultery as a crime. South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck it down in February 2015 in 2009 Hun-Ba 17; India followed in 2018, Taiwan in 2020. The pattern is usually filed under a familiar heading—traditional…
AI Image of a rave created by author. From its emergence in the underground electronic dance scenes of the 1980’s and 1990’s, rave culture has occupied an uneasy space between liberation and disorder. Secret gatherings in abandoned warehouses, forests, beaches, and improvised pop-up spaces became associated with repetitive electronic rhythms, collective dancing, sensory immersion, and…
Florence Nightingale. Coloured lithograph. Source: Wellcome Collection (Public Domain Mark). When we think of the story of human evolution, we often focus on the dramatic, “sexy” storylines: battles for physical or social dominance, hunting large game, and finding mates. But a significant subplot in our shared human story is cooperation. Our ability to cooperate toward…
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),…
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…
View of the Grat Synagogue and the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam by Gerrit Berckheyde (US-PD) This article is part of our series on Law, Religion, and The Johnson Amendment. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. American clergy have long navigated the seam between preaching values and practicing politics. The so‑called Johnson…
Lady Justice at The Palace of Justice, Rome, Italy by Jebulon (CC0 1.0) Against the backdrop of the affirmation of the Modern State and the birth of national legal systems, the hundred years from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century represent a period full of changes for Europe also in the legal field. As…
Nature (AI) by Alan Warburton (CC BY 4.0). In 2014, users on LessWrong, an internet forum, encountered a post by a user named Roko, who posited that humanity would invent a superintelligence. This superintelligence would have the power to create fully accurate computerized simulations of people, essentially ending death. The AI, knowing that its creation…
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…