A sign with “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jiyan Azadi) in Central and Northern Kurdish by Pirehelokan (CC BY-SA 4.0). As a scholar in the field of Islamic studies and material culture since the early 1990s, I have continually read and written about veiling and the hijab in Muslim cultures. In Iran, the hijab has had…
Picture by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash. This essay is based on the author’s 2021 Minnesota Law Review article “The Nineteenth Amendment as a Generative Tool for Defeating LGBT Religious Exemptions.” Since the U.S. Supreme Court held that marriage equality is the law of the land in 2015, American society has been embroiled in a cultural…
Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash. Given the centrality and heatedness of the abortion debate in the U.S. political sphere, it might seem as though abortion has always been a rallying cry for religious conservatives. But as Sarah Posner describes in her book Unholy, despite abortion’s contemporary significance, other evangelical grudges emerged “long before” abortion…
Could Cohabitation Rights Solve the Issue of Unregistered Religious Marriages? A Contextualizing and Summary of Religion and Marriage Law: The Need for Reform Russell Sandberg In my new book, Religion and Marriage Law: The Need for Reform, I argue that the law relating to marriage in England and Wales is outdated and leads to unfairness.…
Preview of Queer Democracy: Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body PoliticDaniel D. Miller For centuries, Western thinkers have imagined society as a body. But why? Why this metaphor to represent society? What conceptual work has this metaphor, the metaphor of the “body politic,” done? And what kind of body has society been imagined to be? Queer…
Photo by Margaux Bellott on Unsplash. A number of states, such as Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, have recently passed laws targeting transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) girls and young women, barring them from participating in girls’ and women’s competitive sports. The state of Arkansas also recently passed a law (Arkansas HB1570) criminalizing gender-affirming medical care…
A virtual conference organized in partnership with Brigham Young University Law School, Emory University Law School, Notre Dame Law School, St. John’s University School of Law, and the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. View the full video and browse all essays here. Section D. Religious Organizations (Mark Movsesian, moderator) “COVID and Egalitarian Catholic…
The judgment of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County, decided on June 15, 2020, is, to say the least, quite controversial. It relates to non-discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment practices and has been applauded by many who champion the legal protection of homosexual and transgender individuals. The…
Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia / photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / CC-BY-SA-3.0 This article is part of our “Reflecting on COVID-19” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. As we transition into the month of June, Malaysia enters the twelfth week of its government-enforced Movement Control Order (MCO), which put its population…
In Israeli society, Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) and traditional Arabs live within close proximity to one another. While these religiously, ethnically, and culturally differentiated groups do not typically interact with each other, women from both groups appear to share certain aspects of their lifestyles. Both live in relatively closed societies; both have relatively limited contact with…