In the conclusion to the volume The Place of Religion in Family Law: A Comparative Search, editor Jane Mair states the book's aim: “[T]o search for the place of religion: a search embarked upon with confidence from within the citadel of family law, with religion quite clearly placed in the position of challenger” (385). But should this be the starting point? Starting from such a proposition indicates that those searching come with presuppositions that a uniform, positivistic law is the norm and that religion is an interloper—indeed, perhaps even an antiquated outsider that is tied to past superstition and cultural belief and that is outmoded in our modern liberal age. To be fair, just after this quotation Mair recognizes that “[a]dmitting the possibility of another, however, inevitably demands self-reflection” (385). This book offers a bit of that self-reflection, but it leans heavily in too many chapters toward discounting religion's role in family law matters. Despite Mair's suggestion, it is not only “uncertainty, change, and crisis” (359) that cause people to turn to religion, but rather an ongoing vitality of religion and faith, a sense of meaning and purpose that religion provides, and the connection to culture and community apart from sheer individualism that religion offers.

The book is part of a series published by the Organising Committee of the Commission on European Family Law (CEFL) that, as stated on the back cover, “is dedicated to the harmonisation and unification of family and succession law in Europe.” This book is laudable for tackling an important project in comparative fashion, but its aims are too broad to accomplish its ends. For example, the essays “cover jurisdictions from Scotland to Sweden and Turkey; from the secular states with predominantly Muslim populations to Catholic and Jewish societies with semi-secular legal systems; from secular to Catholic and Jewish states” (4–5). The book's objective is “to search for the place of religion in each of these both in historical and contemporary contexts” (5). This is a praiseworthy but overly ambitious aim that cannot be accomplished in twelve essays, and one suspects that the editors could have aided their cause by focusing the volume in a tighter fashion. Furthermore, this aim is especially confounded when some of the contributions are absolute conversation-stoppers rather than conversation-facilitators. There is no other way to describe the chapter of Kenneth McK. Norrie, who says that religious “traditionalists continue to cling to their revelatory certainties . . . like small boys clinging to their mothers, hoping to be protected from the complexities of the adult world” (331). Happily, this dismissive tone is not the overall tone of the book, but its presence in Norrie's chapter causes serious harm to an otherwise useful volume. Despite such flaws, Mair and Örücü's volume is a worthwhile work for many scholars interested in comparative family law and religion in Europe, and it contains a few chapters that, on their own, merit a close read.

Structurally, the editors have broken the volume into four sections, preceded by an overarching introductory chapter by Örücü and concluding with an evaluative chapter by Mair. The four parts of the book address, respectively: accommodation, denial, support, and reflection of religion in family law. This heuristic works better with some chapters than others, but I have retained it here in considering the book's contents.

By “accommodating a place for religion,” the editors intend, in the book's first section, to capture the ways in which family law deals with the “treatment of a particular religious group within a larger society, which does not share its religious values or laws” (365). The notion of accommodation, however, starts from the presumed primacy of civil positive law and then contemplates either (a) what concessions might be made for religious perspectives or, instead, (b) how much religious perspectives should assimilate into the existing legal norms. As Werner Menski details in his excellent first chapter, even this starting point could be seen as another example of “not knowing or not wanting to know” (15) about the super-diversity and pluralism that is already extant in the law. Menski discusses the difficulties faced by recent Muslim immigrants to the United Kingdom as their religious and cultural beliefs interact with civil law, but his chapter also illustrates how family law presents tensions within religious communities, particularly when those communities understand their religious commitments to be preeminent and determinative. In the second chapter, Elizabeth Crawford and Janeen Carruthers offer a quite different view. They focus on private international law, including conflict of laws, recognition for foreign marriages and divorces, and the like. These first two chapters are a fascinating juxtaposition. On the one hand, Crawford and Carruthers write in formal, treatise-like fashion and posit that “foreign law starts at the border” (69) and, thus, religious law and decisions by religious bodies and communities are not legally cognizable unless they emanate from proper foreign state (civil) authorities. They disclaim any place for “bespoke application of a party's religious law” (69) but admit that there are a “multiplicity of underlying tensions” (47) in the operation of private law, especially when a United Kingdom civil court is called on to recognize the validity of a foreign customary marriage of some kind in order to grant a divorce. On the other hand, Menski writes from a sociological position and believes that family law scholars ignore the messy reality of family law, as they too often “remain mentally imprisoned by modernity-centric positivist modes of thought” (15). He encourages much greater appreciation and understanding of the ways that family law regulation is not only state-centered but also present within cultural and religious communities, and that it can even be diverse within those communities.

The label of “denying a place for religion” is not an especially apt one for the next trio of chapters, even though they purport to discuss countries that engage in denial. Maarit Jantera-Jareborg's contribution is an accessible and valuable consideration of the paradoxes of the Swedish approach. It contains the ideal balance of history, description versus prescription, and insightful analysis that one looks for in a scholarly work. The author ably details how Sweden, from the overlap in public perception and practice of marriage as a mixed secular and religious institution, to the various accommodations of minority religious practice—especially that of recent immigrants—in family life, does not deny a place for religion in family law so cleanly as is usually described. Masha Antokolskaia describes the Russian experience, which was not a gradual move toward secularism but rather an abrupt transition away from ecclesiastical jurisdiction and control and a radical break with religion in the Bolshevik Revolution. This was followed, more recently, by a return to a more benevolent relationship between civil law and religion, raising questions of church-state entanglement. In the next chapter, Esin Örücü describes the “laic family law of Turkey,” which purports to be “entirely secular” but in practice often aligns with the “religious mores of the people, 98 percent of whom are of the Islamic faith” (117). While some chapters in the book focus too much on history and fail to connect sufficiently to modern law, Örücü, instead, shortchanges the fascinating and possibly instructive history of the Ottoman Empire's millet system, whereby Muslims lived under Islamic law and minority religious groups were allowed to live according to their own personal laws. The “eclecticism and pragmatism” (118) that prevailed in the Ottoman Empire could perhaps provide insight into how a postmodern, multicultural family law might relate to religion, since the “monolithic centralist legal system faces problems to accommodate the Turkish socio-cultural fabric” (153).

The section on supporting a place for religion begins with a chapter by Maebh Harding on religion and family law in Ireland, a Catholic country that constitutionally prohibited divorce until 1995, and is followed by a chapter by Ruth Farrugia on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on family law in Malta. These chapters highlight the ways that Catholic doctrines can be complex and need not lead toward singular and predictable traditional outcomes. The authors probe the ways in which Catholic doctrines on marriage and family are sufficiently comprehensive to provide a full framing for the civil law, but they also pose the implicit question of whether that framing works only when there is a sufficiently shared norm system among members of the population. These chapters are followed by one on Jewish family law and the issue of divorce, by Matthijs De Blois. While part of De Blois's chapter focuses on the legal system of Israel, it pays more attention to Jewish law in general and to the varying approaches currently used in Western states to address the vexing problem of the Jewish religious writ of divorce, known as the get. A Jewish husband must issue a get to his wife prior to issuance of a religious divorce, and his failure to do so carries religious consequences that are much more disadvantageous for the wife than for the husband. This gender imbalance has spurred secular jurisdictions to interact with Jewish religious courts and divorcing couples in interesting ways. These interactions range from decrees of “recommendation” or “obligation” in rabbinical courts in Israel; to varying legislative approaches in New York State, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which allow civil courts to refuse to issue a civil divorce if religious barriers to remarriage persist; to judicial approaches in which civil courts recognize contract or tort claims stemming from a refusal of a husband to issue a get. Still other states and countries reject all of these approaches, preferring a clear separation between civil divorce and religious matters, an approach that De Blois finds to be insufficiently nuanced. The section's final chapter, by Frankie McCarthy, addresses the role of religion within the educational system in the United Kingdom. McCarthy describes the “religious roots” (236) of the British education system and examines publicly funded “faith schools” (those of a denominational character) alongside purportedly secular schools. McCarthy's topic provides insight into one of many intersectional issues of family law (education, health law, taxation), but the chapter seems a one-off and an awkward fit in a volume that otherwise addresses only traditional family law matters of marriage and divorce, illegitimacy, child custody, and (to a lesser extent) maintenance and property division.

The final three chapters purport to address how the civil law might “reflect” a place for religion, but the chapters are an unhappy fit. John Finlay addresses the history of religion in the family law of Scotland. While his chapter is interesting, it is punctuated by observations about urbanization and industrialization in Scotland as the likely driving force behind the disaggregation of religion and religious creeds from state law, and its predominantly historical character makes it a difficult fit with most of the other chapters, which are focused on more contemporary concerns. The chapter by Kenneth McK. Norrie in this section, as mentioned earlier, is so dismissive of conservative religious views on homosexuality and same-sex marriage that it reads as a polemic aimed at demonstrating that any religious teaching that runs counter to gay equality is outdated. Among other things, Norrie fails to consider with any degree of nuance the positions of many religious individuals or groups that might allow for “gay equality” in some matters—for example, in inheritance, adoption, and housing rights—but not for the establishment of same-sex marriage. Norrie also dismisses tolerance (narrowly defined without room for a robust pluralism) as a decisional principle and advocates, instead, for a “dignity analysis.” This leads to his statement that in a number of cases “compromise is inappropriate and full victory for one side or the other may be the only socially acceptable outcome” (325). One suspects that Norrie embraces such a winner-take-all analysis only when it favors his preferred outcome in contests between religious rights and gay equality. By contrast, the following chapter, by Michael Rosie and Fran Wasoff, analyzes empirical data of the 2004 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey to reach more nuanced conclusions about the continuing effects of religious beliefs on public policy. Rosie and Wasoff demonstrate that religiosity is not the only driver of views on marriage, divorce, cohabitation, adoption, and children, but a very important one nonetheless. Religious belief has strong implications for the centrality of marriage in family life and the permissibility of sexual behavior outside of marriage, but it is less determinative as it relates, for example, to attitudes about familial support obligations for unmarried individuals.

Overall, the book suffers from conceiving of religion as existing in a private sphere that is outside the public sphere of civil law—and, then, from questioning how the public sphere should handle this intrusion of the private. The authors would have done well to listen to De Blois, who helpfully describes how “in religious law there is no ‘public’ and ‘private’ distinction, which is so common to an Enlightenment approach to the law. . . . The religious is not a separate sphere next to the secular. There is no secular sphere” (209). While this is not uniformly true for all religions or for all religious believers, confining religious beliefs to the private sphere risks rejecting the robust pluralism that modern society has embraced, and it fails to account for what has been described elsewhere as the postmodern resurgence of religion. Finally, as I have written elsewhere (see Joel A. Nichols, ed., Marriage and Divorce in a Multicultural Context: Multi-Tiered Marriage and the Boundaries of Civil Law and Religion, Cambridge University Press, 2012), insisting on such a private/public distinction is descriptively inaccurate with regard both to the state of the law and to the lived experience of a great many individuals worldwide. Marriage, divorce, and other family matters share a “dual nature” for many citizens in society—they are both civil and religious. Liberal democracies ignore this duality and complexity at risk to the legitimacy of their authority.