(Papers to be published in Pepperdine Law Review)
As the world has moved into the 21st century, new tensions between law and religion have become an almost daily affair. Recent examples of these tensions in the United States include a wide range of conflicts, including a proposed circumcision ban in San Francisco, the rise of anti-Sharia bills that prevent state courts from considering religious law, and state laws prohibiting religiously-motivated business owners from denying services for same-sex weddings. The Supreme Court has itself been called upon to address recent skirmishes between law and religion, issuing decisions in both Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC and CLS v. Martinez that consider conflicts between anti-discrimination norms and religious liberty.
While these debates implicate a wide range of considerations, a recurring theme is the unique challenge of reconciling conflicts not just between religion and law, but between “religious legal communities” and the law of the nation-state. American Muslim and Jewish communities serve as prime examples of such religious legal communities—that is, communities that experience their religious norms through the prism of legal rules—and thus the challenges faced by these communities often parallel each other in important ways. Moreover, the increasingly complicated relationship between law and religion is not unique to the United States. Other liberal democracies continue to experience growing pains in their attempts to find the ideal balance between religious liberties and secular concerns. In turn, the jointly-sponsored program of the Islamic and Jewish Law sections focuses on some of these unique philosophical and legal challenges that emerge for religious legal communities within the context of the 21st century liberal democracy.