You should start making plans now to attend Seton Hall's conference, Religious Legal Theory: The State of the Field, on November 12 and 13. Here's the description:
During the twentieth century purely secular perspectives dominated legal theory. Most legal scholars thought of religion with regard to the law exclusively in terms of church-state relations and freedom of religion. In recent years, however, scholars of law and other disciplines have expanded their focus to include the contributions that religious convictions and perspectives can make to general legal theory and to our understanding of many areas of the law that seem at first sight unrelated to religion.
For example, in his address at the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, AALS President John Garvey emphasized the importance of religious perspectives on law. Major university presses have published volumes on the intersection of faith, legal theory and theology (”Faith and Law: How Religious Traditions from Calvinism to Islam View American Law” (Cochran, ed. NYU Press 2007); “The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics and Human Nature” (Witte and Alexander, eds. Columbia University Press 2006); “Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought” (McConnell, Cochran & Carmella, eds. Yale University Press 2001). Established legal scholars have published work in law reviews offering explicitly religious perspectives. The Journal of Law and Religion publishes symposia on topics such as “Emerging Applications of Jewish Law in American Legal Scholarship,” and The Journal of Catholic Social Thought offers symposia on a variety of topics, both global and domestic. Numerous blogs and other non-traditional publishing venues are devoted to serious reflection on religious conceptions of law and public good.
