In this article, we investigate the role of religious experts in criminal cases related to blasphemy in Indonesia, a country with one of the world’s largest Muslim populations. Our analysis of 106 decisions in blasphemy-related cases between 2011 and 2022 shows that expert witnesses in these cases have been much more influential than in other criminal cases, with their testimony often leading to conviction. We found that religious experts in cases of blasphemy against Islam were predominantly members of the Indonesian Ulama Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, or MUI) which has an institutionalized link to the government that provides it with funding and personal connections to senior government officials. With its great public legitimacy, MUI members are preferred by police and judges over religious experts not affiliated with it. We argue that this preference is not simply an illustration of the power of a religious authority dominated by conservative groups. Rather, a combination of the factors, including the interests of conservative groups, state narratives of public order, the selection of expert witnesses and their influence on judicial decision-making, reflect the innately political nature of blasphemy in Indonesia and its capacity to serve the interests of competing members of the political elite.

The genre of Islamic juristic opinions (fatāwā or nawāzil) provides a fascinating window into how Muslim jurists—both medieval and modern—have applied theoretical sharī‘a guidelines to actual problems facing their communities. Because Muslim practitioners have historically sought fatāwā (sing. fatwā) on matters ranging from the legal to the ethical to the ritual, these juristic opinions allow us to trace not only the concerns of believers in different Muslim societies over time, but also the moral imagination of the jurists as they grappled with those concerns. In this article, I present a close reading of a fatwā by the late modern Moroccan jurist al-Mahdī b. Muḥammad al-Wazzānī (1849–19231) on the moral value of polygamy versus monogamy. I show how his legal opinion can be fruitfully read in the context of larger debates across the Middle East and Muslim societies over marriage law and ethics. I suggest that al-Wazzānī’s fatwā represents a traditionalist reaction to the wave of modernist-feminist religious reform that was sweeping through the region at the turn of and into the twentieth century, and that sought to discredit the traditional Islamic practice of polygamy in favor of monogamy.

In this essay, I recount the history of the founding and early years of the Journal of Law and Religion from its origins in the Committee on Religion and Law through the editorial transitions in 1988 that led to a second phase of JLR’s history. In recounting this history, I focus on the exceptional scholars who brought JLR into existence and nurtured its growth during those early years, creating, in the process, not only new academic endeavor but a community and a kind of family.

The question of the probative value of written evidence in Islamic law has been a long-standing discussion. Muslim jurists have historically been skeptical of recognizing writing as a form of proof, which was well illustrated in doctrinal books penned in premodern Islamic legal history. While previous studies have explored this skepticism or argued for a different approach, many of them lack evidence from actual legal practice. In this article, I provide a fresh perspective on the evidentiary value of written evidence in Islamic law by examining Ottoman court records from the eighteenth century. Instead of focusing on theoretical discussions, I examine how courts and central administration responded to cases of forgery. I argue that the Ottoman legal system was indifferent to forgery of documents, unless committed by state officials, for, in alignment with the doctrinal skepticism toward writing in Islamic law, they did not attribute any evidentiary value to documents. Thus, I conclude that the Ottoman legal practice closely reflected the reluctance of Muslim jurists to recognize the probative value of written evidence in the eighteenth century, showcasing the harmony between the theory and application of Islamic law.

This article deals with late antique Jewish and Christian discourse on social hierarchy, martyrology, and attitudes toward the law and the commandments. I place Jewish and Christian attitudes to martyrdom in late antiquity within the larger system of the commandments. Beyond the circumstantial connections between martyrdom and the affirmation or violation of laws, I argue that martyrdom constitutes an important lens for the examination of the rule of the law and for the negotiation of socio-religious hierarchies. I argue that the elevation of martyrdom creates inner tension vis-à-vis the idea of life-long righteousness based on adherence to the law. I discuss the construction of martyrdom as the final and ultimate commandment, necessary for reaching a state of perfection. Through addressing a case where martyrdom is presented as competing with, if not substituting, a life according to the law, I discuss the theme of an upside-down world, which appears in both Christian and Rabbinic literature, concerning martyrs. In this framework, I discuss the view of martyrdom as a kind of stairway to heaven—an instrument for rapid advancement allowing to overtake those who lived according to the law—and the unique perception of law and martyrology in the fourth-century Syriac-Christian Book of Steps, which places the martyrs below the perfect.

After its initial founding by the Council on Religion and Law at Harvard, the Journal of Law and Religion had its first life at Hamline University School of Law beginning in 1983. This essay is a history of its second life—from 1987/1988 to 2013—describing the vision and the people who pursued that vision through the journal in those years and some of the roundtables and symposia it published.

The Journal of Law and Religion began publishing as part of the larger revival and reimagination of the academic encounter with religion. More specifically, it sought from the start to examine an entire panoply of issues: secular law regarding religion, religious views of secular law and the state, political philosophy, political theology, religious law, and legal and religious pluralism as overarching ideas. What was at stake to the journal’s founders was not just intellectual curiosity but their conviction that this kaleidoscope of concerns was essential to reconstituting a healthy polity, to play a role in responding to a crisis of values that afflicted both religion and the secular state. The journal has also sought to consider questions across the full range of world religions, including non-Western religions. Again, this is not expanding the canon for its own sake. The larger story of legal systems and religions in all their specificity and complex interactions, as revealed by rigorous and imaginative analysis, could ideally help establish a counter-narrative to the simple pieties of modernity. The challenges today, especially our current state of political polarization, which envelops religion in its wake, are different, but they demand the same careful, expansive, scholarly agenda.

The concept of mercy is often proposed as an antidote to the punitive excesses of our current criminal justice system. But this concept is typically presented in generalized, abstract terms that seem unworkable as a pragmatic decision strategy. Its religious origins and associations only add to this impression. In fact, however, if the biblical accounts of mercy are interpreted using the narrative strategy that is featured in current scholarship, an eminently practical decision protocol emerges from these accounts. This protocol diverges from the common or popular view of mercy. It omits the demand for contrition or gratitude on the part of the wrongdoer, viewing this as an effort to exercise domination rather than extending mercy, and minimizes compassion on the part of the decision maker due to its tendency to merge into favoritism. Instead, the protocol recommends that the decision maker deal with the wrongdoer on a direct personal level, suppress any emotional responses such as anger or indignation, and consider the collateral consequences of the proposed punishment. The author describes the way the protocol can be derived from leading biblical narratives about mercy, including the expulsion from the garden, the mark of Cain, Christ and the adulteress, and the prodigal son. He expands on this derivation by analyzing the book of Jonah, rejecting the common view that this work is a satire and treating it instead as a profound inquiry into the nature of mercy. He concludes by applying the protocol he has derived to policy level decisions in the criminal justice system, specifically judicial sentencing, administrative parole and the use of restorative justice.

This article examines the rise of ecclesial units in US prisons, wherein inmates are trained and certified for Christian evangelism as state-assigned inmate field ministers. Unlike general religious education programs in public prisons, these newer units, referred to within prison communities as God pods, function as ecclesial training centers for Christian ministry undertaken by matriculated state prisoners. The author contrasts the work of inmate field ministers with that of public chaplains governed by mandates of religious neutrality. Drawing from on-site and archival research, the author contends that these new programs instantiate Christian doctrine as government speech while imposing religious tests for public benefits upon state prisoners. The author profiles recent case law advancing a history-and-tradition standard for Establishment Clause cases, while noting the long-standing expectation of religious neutrality by public institutions. The author highlights recent scholarly accounts of US prisons as imbued with Christian theology amid a broader defunding of secular rehabilitation. While religious entrepreneurs have long delivered Christian programming in public prisons, new ecclesiastical units institutionalize Christian doctrine as state rehabilitation, raising urgent questions about religious liberty in the carceral sphere and the future of faith-based programming.

In this article, the author develops an Islamic normative legal theoretical framework by using three key Islamic methodological approaches—(1) juridical theory of law (uṣūl), (2) legal maxims (qawāʿid), and (3) purposive-based theory (maqāṣid)—in light of Ronald Dworkin’s notions of rules, principles, and policies, respectively. While uṣūl is used to develop rules, qawāʿid and maqāṣid provide the normative values that govern rulemaking. In addition to presenting a coherent model of Islamic normative legal theory, the author examines legitimacy issues of Islamic law that relate to links of rules to sharīʿa revealed texts and applies the Islamic normative legal theoretical framework to contemporary rulings on the environment, organ transplants, and Islamic finance. The case studies show that using the integrated normative framework would yield more ethical rulings than those that focus on juridical methods (uṣūl) only. The author argues that while the extent of legal legitimacy can vary across different rulings, the application of the Islamic normative legal framework ensures normative legitimacy in all cases, ensuring the moral character of Islamic law.

After the Occultation of the Twelfth Imam (al-ghaybah al-kubrā) in the fourth AH/tenth CE century, the applicability of divinely ordained punishments, ḥudūd, became a subject of theo-juridical controversies between two groups of Shiʿi jurists: pro- and anti-ḥudūd. In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the establishment of a Shiʿi theocracy, Iranian theocrats supported the pro-ḥudūd Shiʿi jurists, and as a result, ḥudūd punishments were incorporated into the Islamic Penal Code and have been applied by the state ever since. Some Iranian legal reformers, recognizing the challenges in applying ḥudūd punishments, have put forward two politico-juridical mechanisms (zarfiyat): the secondary ruling and the state order. These two mechanisms, the reformers assert, may be used by the Islamic Republic of Iran to suspend ḥudūd punishments. In this article, I examine both the arguments presented by reformers and the objections to these arguments raised by conservative and Shiʿi orthodox-minded jurists. These objections pose doctrinal challenges that impede the utilization of these mechanisms, thus obstructing the suspension of ḥudūd punishments.

This festschrift essay honors the academic life and work of Douglas Laycock, one of the most important scholars and advocates in American law and religion. This essay offers tribute to a mentor from whom I took three classes and an independent study in law school, for whom I worked as a research assistant, and with whom I have remained in close conversation during my two decades in the academy. It also offers an insider’s account of Laycock’s intellectual project and influence—punctuated with stories, observations, and nuggets of wisdom drawn from a close reading of his scholarship and briefs. This essay traces Laycock’s career from his early academic work to his later role in landmark Supreme Court litigation, ultimately seeing Laycock’s deepest legacy as lying not only in the doctrines he helped shape, but in a model of intellectually serious, cross-ideological engagement that both inspires us and calls us to account.

It was a puzzle to the British and has been a puzzle to historians ever since, why the American colonists, who enjoyed a degree of liberty, political autonomy, and even low taxation that was the envy of subjects in the home country, would join in a risky revolution to sever ties with the nation of their origin. The answer, according to Edmund Burke, was in large part religion. “Religion,” he explained to fellow members of Parliament in his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” always a “principle of energy,” was “no way worn out or impaired” in North America—and that religion was of a particular kind. Burke wrote: “The religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” Of all faiths, this hyper-Protestantism, wrote Burke, is “the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” This article sets out the ecclesiological, experiential, and theological differences among the largest Protestant denominations in Revolutionary America and the ways in which these differences contributed not just to the revolutionary spirit, but to the democratic and republican strands of revolutionary and constitutional thought in the new United States. The biggest contrast was between members and clergy of the Church of England, who were most involved to remain Loyalists, Reformed Protestants (Congregationalists and Presbyterians), who inclined toward republicanism, and Baptists, who were the most democratic and individualistic.

According to the biblical narrative, among the creatures of the Earth, human beings are uniquely God’s image-bearers, and we are also tragically prone to claim divinity for ourselves in ways that produce violence and judgment. Technology is a human good, part of our cultural mandate, but it also magnifies our worst tendencies. One of the great temptations of artificial intelligence is its mimetic capacity. AI systems mimic human creativity and judgment but lack human moral capacities. Granting a concern about mimesis, perhaps some version of non-reductive physicalism is correct and something we could call true intelligence might emerge from a future AI system. It could be that humans would owe some kind of duties toward AI as moral patients akin to what we, the stewards of creation, owe the various components of the natural world. But, from the perspective of Christian theological ethics, even if we entertain a kind of Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of emergence and causal powers that could admit this possibility, we should remember the biblical narrative concerning human uniqueness. The great chain of being retains vitality as a metaphor in that it reminds us about the role of mediation in the relationship between God and creation.

This article explores the connection between the ecclesiology and the beliefs on church-state relations of Baptists in the mid-twentieth-century United States. The author analyzes white Baptists’ reactions to the US Supreme Court rulings in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) and McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), both of which inaugurated the modern era of strict separationist Establishment Clause jurisprudence. The author also traces the development of Baptist beliefs on how the institutional church relates to individual salvation—beliefs that distinguished Baptists from both Catholics and most other Protestants—and statements from US Baptist leadership supporting church-state separation. The author demonstrates that Baptists’ beliefs on the internal, individualistic, and non-sacramental nature of salvation induced them to see any government-sponsored religious activity as likely corrupting of a person’s genuine choice of salvation. Furthermore, Baptists’ origins as a persecuted minority in Europe and the United States reinforced their idea that government-sponsored religion would lead to the suppression of true Christianity. For both reasons, then, state-sponsored religion was not God’s design. Beginning with Everson and McCollum and continuing with later cases through the 1960s, Baptist’s strict separationism became the binding interpretation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause through Justice Hugo Black, who authored both the Everson and McCollum majority opinions. Although no longer a Baptist when the rulings were issued, Black retained his Baptist influence on church-state issues and enshrined strict separationism into American case law for decades, leading to a Baptist triumph that many Baptists themselves would later regret and attempt to reverse.

Douglas Laycock’s career in Religion Clause scholarship and advocacy spans two periods marked by two distinct concerns at the heart of the debates. This article connects them. In the first period, from the 1980s into the 2000s, the central issue was what general value or principle should drive Religion Clause decision-making. Laycock’s approach, substantive neutrality toward religion, focused on minimizing government effects on religious choices and thus led the way in reconciling two key values: neutrality on the one hand, and religious liberty or voluntarism on the other. In the second period, from the mid-2000s forward, religious liberty became caught up in the United States’ cycle of polarization. Laycock again led the way; his work on Religion Clause neutrality supports the effective defense of religious liberty in a polarized age. In particular, he called for aggregating neutrality: recognizing that any policy can have differing effects on the religious choices of different relevant actors and comparing those effects with the goal of minimizing burdensome effects on religious choices overall. This approach, done with care, can take account of the effect on competing sides and thus productively address polarized conflicts.

The article addresses the challenges that increasing capabilities pose to freedom of thought and conscience. The author contrasts the ongoing debate about the ability to manipulate the human mind with the deeply rooted theories and judicial treatments of freedom of thought and conscience and argues for renewed attention to the subject. Briefly noting that the issue of AI manipulation has especially preoccupied legal scholars, institutions, and societies at large for its impact on the economic market, religious extremism, and politics, the author argues that the capabilities of AI stretch well beyond these limited fields as they challenge the centuries-long notion of freedom of conscience and thought. Because AI capabilities can extract information about individuals’ thoughts and feelings, they are making obsolete the deeply held belief that what is within the human mind (forum internum) is protected from intrusion by its very nature. The author explores the notion of the extended mind to show how the frequent reliance on smart technologies reveals a need to strengthen their protection in order to protect their users. Finally, the author criticizes the widespread focus on the notion of manipulation in recent developments across a range of disciplines and argues for a stronger and more direct consideration of freedom of thought and conscience to update their legal and academic treatment.

During the early twentieth century, Ivy League legal scholars developed a positivist jurisprudential method known as legal realism. Concerned with the law’s relationship to social conditions, legal realism methodologically triumphed in the elite legal academy and brought to a close what one historian has described as the “decline of natural law” in American jurisprudence. Catholic legal scholars in the United States responded to this decline by invoking the natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his nineteenth-century neoscholastic disciples, arguing that legal realism irredeemably divorced law and morality. In so doing, these scholars effectively inaugurated what the author terms the neoscholastic legal revival, a decades-long period of debate between Catholic natural lawyers and their positivist contemporaries about natural law’s foundational relationship to the US legal tradition. To explain the history and significance of this debate, the author uncovers the origins the neoscholastic legal revival in particular features of nineteenth-century European Catholic intellectual culture that were transmitted to the United States through the Society of Jesus, the world’s largest Catholic religious order. The author especially examines the lives and legacies of two American Jesuits, William J. Kenealy and Francis E. Lucey, who helped to lead the neoscholastic legal revival and who illustrate how recovering the revival’s forgotten history can enrich scholars’ understanding of this important period in US legal history.