Here are two essays, by Gregg Easterbrook and Leon Wieseltier, on the "religion, morals, and the 2004 election" question. Both are well worth reading.
Rick
Monday, November 15, 2004
Religion and Politics in The New Republic
DOJ's Annual Capital Punishment Report
Here is the annual report, put out by the DOJ's Office of Justice Programs, on capital punishment in the United States. (Thanks to the Volokh Conspiracy for the link). Eleven States and the Federal Government executed a total of 65 persons in 2003 (down slightly from 2002).
Rick
Lawyers, Faith, and Social Justice
I received in the mail today an announcement of an upcoming conference at the Pepperdine University School of Law: "Lawyers, Faith, and Social Justice: Our Responsibility to 'The Orphan, the Widow, the Alien,' and 'the Least of These." (February 4-5, 2005, in Malibu). The Conference is co-sponsored by Pepperdine's Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics, and features contributions by, inter alia, MOJers Michael Scaperlanda, Mark Sargent, and Steve Bainbridge -- and also honorary blogger (whether he likes it or not) Tom Shaffer. Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Much of the Mosaic law, the Psalms, and the prophets plead the cause of "the orphan, the widow, and the alien." (Deut. 10:18-19; Ps. 146:9; Jer. 7:6). Indeed, it seems that God judges a nation and its citizens by their care for the neediest among them.
In one of Jesus' last discussions with his disciples, he stated that in the last days, people will be judged by how they care for those in greatest need. "Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it to me." (Mt. 25:40) Other religious traditions have similar admonitions.
Lawyers affect the lives of people at all levels of need. Law practice should lead to greater social justice, but there is a danger that it will lead to social injustice. This conference will explore three ways in which lawyers have a substantial impact on "the orphan, the widow, the alien," and "the least of these."
- Some lawyers pursue social justice directly, representing those in need in traditional legal aid offices, in criminal defense and prosecutors' offices, and human rights clinics. In an era of shrinking governmental support for such programs, much of the creativity, support, and energy for such programs has come from religious communities. We will hear from lawyers involved, both as volunteers and full-time workers, in some of the most innovative social justice programs created in recent years.
- In addition, lawyers, as infiuential citizens, officeholders, governmental advisors, and political commentators, have a substantial impact on social policy at local, state, and national levels. They have an opportunity to work for laws that benefit, rather than harm, those in need. We will hear some of the most thoughtful critics of our current social policy discuss directions that might help to empower the weakest among us.
- Finally, lawyers who represent corporations and other businesses can serve the cause of social justice in their role as wise counselor to their clients, raising social concerns with clients and structuring business arrangements that consider those in need. Might it be that following the lawyer failures of Enron, the corporate bar might return to a day when, as one prominent 1950s Wall Street lawyer said, lawyers were "the conscience of Wall Street?"
For each of these roles, we will consider the life of an historical role model: Dorothy Day, the founder of The Catholic Worker; William Wilberforce, the evangelical member of Parliament who successfully led the fight against the slave trade; and Louis Brandeis, who, prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court, took on many public causes and took, in one client's words, a "judicial attitude" toward his clients.
Rick
Sunday, November 14, 2004
The Election as Viewed From the Vatican
John Allen's on-line report, The Word from Rome, which is part of a regular series on events in the Vatican for the National Catholic Reporter, describes the Vaticans informal talk-around-the-water-cooler reaction to the results of the American presidential election.
First, the election of President Bush, which was brought about at least in part by the approval of voters in key states for his endorsement of moral views that comport with orthodox Christian teaching (i.e., opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion) as sharply (and positively) was viewed by Vatican insiders as standing in sharp and favorable contrast with the apparent European antipathy toward permitting individuals with traditional religious beliefs to hold governmental office. In a recent posting, Rick Garnett noted the recent episode in which Italys minister of European affairs, Rocco Buttiglione, a faithful Catholic who agrees with the Churchs teachings on homosexual conduct as being disordered (while eschewing any legal sanction against it), was excluded from his anticipated appointment to justice minister of the European Union.
Second, Vatican leaders are relieved that the Church will not constantly be confronted by the problems attendant to having a professing Catholic president who by his policies and pronouncements regularly contradicts Church teaching on abortion, stem-cell research, etc. (To the extent that the Vaticans relief is because the Church has been spared the scandal of a pro-abortion Catholic in the White House, I certainly share that sentiment. But the Church is not thereby spared from the difficult work of determining how better to engage with and challenge those politicians who claim communion on Sunday but reject it during the week when faced with sanctity-of-life questions. To be sure, we all now can move forward on those questions with careful deliberation and with somewhat lessened urgency, but the questions cannot be evaded nor in the end are they any less difficult.)
Greg Sisk
Johnson on "the New Gnosticism"
Emory's Luke Timothy Johnson has an article (no link yet) in the current (anniversary edition) of Commonweal. The article is called "A New Gnosticism," and suggests a "genuine analogy between the situation of the church today and the challenge Gnosticism presented to the church in the mid-second century." Johnson develops the argument that "four characteristics of contemporary Christian thinking" -- "superior knowledge given by historical consciousness, individualism, preference for the universal over the particular, and for spirituality over religion" -- amount to "a new form of dualism" that "corresponds roughly to the ancient Gnostic dislike of the body."
Obviously, there's a lot more to the article than this summary suggests. The observation that grabbed my attention, though -- and that seems most relevant to MOJ's subject matter -- is that the "reduced significance of the institutional church in the lives of most Christians" makes the above-mentioned "four characteristics" all the more worrisome. Certainly, one of the persistent themes in contemporary law-and-religion discussions concerns the role of groups, associations, churches, and institutions in religious-liberty law and discourse. Johnson's article could add a lot to these discussions. Find it if you can!
Rick
Consent
Two interesting items on the place of "consent" in legal theory: First, there is the latest entry in Larry Solum's always enlightening "Legal Theory Lexicon." Professor Solum explores the reasons why "consent" is thought to have legal and moral force and discusses, among other things, the relevance of virtue theory and "autonomy."
Next (link courtesy of Larry Solum) is this blurb about Peter Westen's book, "The Logic of Consent: The Diversity and Deceptiveness of Consent as a Defense to Criminal Conduct," which analyzes the varied nature of consent arguments in criminal law and examines the confusions that commonly arise from the failure of legislatures, courts and commentators to understand them.
Rick
Culture Watch
From Zenit:
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Consequences of De-Christianization
LONDON, NOV. 13, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Britain's Royal Navy stirred the waves last month when, for the first time, it gave official recognition to the practice of Satanism. According to an Oct. 24 report in the Telegraph, Chris Cranmer, a naval technician serving on the frigate Cumberland, is now allowed to perform Satanic rituals on board ship. He would also be able to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan if he were to be killed in action.
Cranmer is now petitioning the Ministry of Defense so that Satanism can be a registered religion in the armed forces. According to the Telegraph, the Church of Satan was founded in San Francisco in 1966 by Anton Szandor LaVey, author of "The Satanic Bible."
The article quoted a Royal Navy spokesman as saying that Cranmer's unconventional beliefs would not cause problems on board ship. "We are an equal-opportunities employer and we don't stop anybody from having their own religious values," he said.
In an Oct. 26 commentary in the Scotsman newspaper, Bruce Anderson said that naval authorities gave the go-ahead to Cranmer because they feared a lengthy legal action that could have ended up before the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, costing millions of pounds. The government, he said, is at fault for "nervously allowing a rights-based legal culture to intrude upon the armed forces."
Sophie Masson, in a commentary published Oct. 27 in the Sydney Morning Herald, considered the religious implications. The Church of Satan, she noted, says that "we are our own gods." Moreover, they hold that all traditional sins are virtues, that altruism is a myth and that the Christian virtues are just hypocrisy. ...
Any thoughts from our religious freedom scholars?
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Who Is to Judge the Morality of the Iraq War
[From America (americamagazine.org), Vol. 191 No. 15, November 15, 2004.] |
Of Many Things |
By Drew Christiansen, S.J. |
| Who is to judge Though under Catholic social teaching every person and group has responsibility for the common good, the government’s propagandists insisted that the administration alone had the responsibility to judge whether it was morally right to go to war. The opinions of dissenters had no standing. There is an obvious sense, of course, in which public officials bear the primary responsibility to make the key judgments about the morality of a prospective war. Because they exercise the war-making authority, they naturally assume responsibility for moral assessment of the case for war. It does not follow, however, that they are the only ones who have such responsibility. After World War II, the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, we may no longer presume that judgments about the morality of war belong exclusively to those in power. Unquestioning assent to political authority is a vestige of the days when warriors ruled. Just as blind obedience is no excuse for soldiers to fulfill criminal orders, so blind patriotism is no excuse for citizens to go along with a mistaken or trumped-up case for war. Our growing understanding of how the United States and Britain went to war in Iraq suggests that in the future it may be prudent to allow only a weak, prima facie presumption in favor of a government’s moral decision-making role. The Bush administration’s rush to war, with the complicity of Congress, provides a case study of how incompetence, in the form of poor and mishandled intelligence, combined with ideology, leads to erroneous--if not unscrupulous--moral judgments. As a vehicle for public moral decision-making, our system of government is broken. The reports of the Congressional 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Survey Group have left the central myth used to support the presumption in favor of political authority--that elected leaders know more than informed citizens--in tatters.Millions of people marching in the streets around the world knew better than our elected leaders. Academics and journalists knew better. The pope, the bishops and nearly all the churches in the United States knew better. We must conclude that in the future the presumption for the moral judgment of political authority can be no more than a weak one and that the duty of citizens to make their dissenting judgments public is a weighty one. At the beginning of the modern era, the Spanish Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (d. 1617) argued that military commanders had the obligation to declare their conscientious judgments to the king. In a democracy, we can do no less; and we ought to do more. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1982 message for the World Day of Peace, “Rulers must be supported and enlightened by a public opinion that encourages them or, where necessary, expresses disapproval.” The U.S. bishops, in The Challenge of Peace, cited this admonition to urge the public to say no to nuclear war; but the principle has broader application. If we follow the pope’s advice, in the course of democratic policymaking the public has a responsibility to set a limit to the war-making discretion political leaders are allowed. In light of the war in Iraq, it appears that the catechism’s No. 2309 needs updating. The revision should take into account recent church teaching and the example of the pope, bishops and faithful in opposing war. It should acknowledge the fallibility and the failures of political leaders. Above all, it should affirm the right and responsibility of the public to set a limit in public opinion to the war-making of elected political elites. |
| Drew Christiansen, S.J., is an associate editor of America. |
Friday, November 12, 2004
Disclosure Duties and the Sin of Omission
This paper, "Common Law Disclosure Duties and the Sin of Omission," looks interesting. (Thanks to Larry Solum). Here's the abstract:
Since ancient times, legal scholars have explored the vexing question of when and what a contracting party must disclose to her counterparty, even in the absence of explicit misleading statements. This fascination has culminated in a set of claims regarding which factors drive courts to impose disclosure duties on informed parties. Most of these claims are based on analysis of a small number of non-randomly selected cases and have not been tested systematically. This article represents the first attempt to systematically test a number of these claims using data coded from 466 case decisions spanning over a wide array of jurisdictions and covering over 200 years.
The results are mixed. In some cases it appears that conventional wisdom is correct. For example, our data support the claim that courts are more likely to require disclosure of latent, as opposed to patent, defects. In addition, courts are more likely to require full disclosure between parties in a fiduciary or confidential relationship. On the other hand, our results cast doubt on much of the conventional wisdom regarding the law of fraudulent silence. Indeed, our results challenge ten of the most prominent theories that have been asserted to explain when courts will require disclosure. We find that courts are no more likely to impose disclosure duties when the information is casually acquired as opposed to deliberately acquired and that unequal access to information by the contracting parties is not a significant factor that drives courts to require disclosure. We do find, however, that when these two factors are present simultaneously courts are significantly more likely to force disclosure. Perhaps most interestingly, although it is generally understood that courts have become more likely to impose disclosure duties over time, we find that courts actually have become less likely to require disclosure over time.
Rick
Conservative Christians and Social Justice
Blogger Stuart Buck has an interesting post, "Conservative Christians and Social Justice," reflecting on the observation that "[w]e are clearly in the middle of one of the great periods of Christian revival in American history, the third or fourth of the "Great Awakenings" in American Protestantism. . . . [B]ut why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior?"
Rick
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
