Suchergebnisse

"The problem of absolutes" refers to the difficulty of grounding and defending absolute prohibitions in a legal system that is rationalized on the basis of means-ends rationality. (An example might be the difficulty in identifying an absolute prohibition on torture that is not susceptible to being reinterpreted, read down, or negotiated away.) In the present paper, I associate this difficulty in the first instance with Max Weber's account of the rationalization of law and the distancing of law from any sense of sacred or transcendent obligation. But other developments need to be considered as well. I argue that the problem is as much about morality as it is about law. The two-law and morality-develop together in a complementary way, and the problem of legal absolutes tends to be matched by a corresponding difficulty with moral absolutes, just as the desanctification of law tends to be matched by a desanctification of morality"--

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- SECTION I. Religious freedom and human flourishing in Nigeria -- 1. Squaring the circle: Freedom of religion and secularism in the Nigerian constitution -- Introduction -- History of freedom of religion in Nigerian jurisprudence -- The 1959 Constitutional Conference: negotiating Nigerian religious freedom -- Management of sharia in Nigerian constitutionalism -- The 1959 settlement and the privatisation of sharia -- Privatisation of sharia and limitation of Sharia Courts -- Secularity as a contested constitutional norm -- Section 10 of the Nigerian Constitution and non‑establishment of religion -- Comparative secularist perspectives and assessment of Nigerian secularism -- Tension between secularity and religious freedom in Nigeria -- Disestablishment in the 1979 Constitution -- Rawlsian ordering and the "fact of pluralism" -- Nigerian constitutional confusion on religion -- Conclusion -- 2. Human flourishing, church leadership and legal disputes in Nigerian churches -- Introduction -- Conceptualisation of terms -- Churches and the promotion of human flourishing -- Church disputes -- Celestial Church of Christ (CCC) -- Christ Apostolic Church (CAC) -- Effects of church disputes on human flourishing -- Strife amongst members -- Loss of reputation -- Loss of focus and progress -- Waste of resources -- Schism and burden of members -- Towards effective internal governance mechanisms -- Conclusion -- 3. Freedom of, from or for religion: Perspectives from proscription of religious activities in halls of residence at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile‑Ife, Nigeria -- Introduction -- Contentions over boundaries of religious freedom in higher education space -- Regulatory framework for sound disturbance in Nigeria -- National and state level regulations -- Higher education institution regulations.

This book explores different theories of law, religion, and tradition, from both a secular and a religious perspective. It reflects on how tradition and change can affect religious and secular legal reasoning, identifying the patterns of legal evolution within religious and secular traditions. It is often taken for granted that, even in law, change corresponds and correlates to progress - that things ought to be changed and they will necessarily get better. There is no doubt that legal changes over the centuries have made it possible to enhance the protection of individual rights and to somewhat contain the possibility of tyranny and despotism. But progress is not everything in law: stability and certainty lie at the core of the rule of law. Similarly, religions and religious laws could not survive without traditions; and yet, they still evolve, and their evolution is often intermingled with secular law. The book asks (and in some ways answers) the questions: What is the role of tradition within religions and religious laws? What is the impact of religious traditions on secular laws, and vice-versa? How are the elements of tradition to be identified? Are they the same within the secular and the religious realm? Do secular law and religious law follow comparable patterns of change? Do their levels of resilience differ significantly? How does the history of religion and law affect changes within religious traditions and legal systems? The overall focus of the book addresses the extent to which tradition plays a role in shaping and re-shaping secular and religious laws, as well as their mutual boundaries.

The ancient world : the triumph of Augustine -- The power of revealed truth -- England, the enlightenment, and the age of eros -- From puritanism to the pursuit of happiness -- The world of the framers : a Christian nation? -- The fundamental maxims of free government -- The second great awakening -- Tending to corrupt the public morals -- Contraception and abortion : from the founding to the 1950s -- Strange freaks of nature -- Coming out -- Obscenity and the First Amendment : a corrupting and debasing influence -- The end of obscenity -- Sex and speech in the Twenty-First century -- The constitution and the contraception -- The road to Roe -- Roe and beyond -- The gay moment -- A right to retain their dignity -- Same-sex marriage and the constitution

The "problem of order" is resolved idyllically in Arrow-Debreu general-equilibrium models through the assumption of perfect information, where each actor is god-like, omniscient, and where this omniscience results in the veracity of the first theorem of welfare economics, where an equilibrium is Pareto efficient, where no actor, given her original endowments of alienable and inalienable capital, can improve her position. Analogously, in many religions, God is understood to be omniscient; order emerges through God's ability to sanction malfeasance costlessly. Ideally, a comparable order would likewise be the consequence of the assumption in both economics and religion of an omnipotent principal. In both economics and religion, equilibria serve as idealized, transcendent, critical standards. In the real, immanent, world, where information is imperfect and no power is absolute, the institutionalization of law is necessary to maintain order. Religion has bequeathed to the legal order moral principles that may legitimate the law and make it binding, while economics, as a theory of incentives in the immanent world, models the imposition of legal sanctions, which penalize actors who approach and violate the law strategically. The law is an institutional order, where both constitutive norms and legal rules are legitimated through "religious" values and supported by "economic," situational sanctions.

There is a widespread tendency in modern, secular society to view law and religion as unrelated except insofar as they may, from time to time, come into conflict. However, intimate relations between the two have been constituted and constantly changed throughout history. Law and religion are two great interconnecting values and belief structures with their own normative, authoritative sources and mechanisms, as well as their own legislation and amendment processes and steps. However, at the practical level, the relationship between the two has not often been smooth sailing. This paper seeks to untangle the confusion, conflicts and complications that have arisen, especially in the Zimbabwean context, when legal statutes have appeared to be in opposition with religious beliefs and practices. The major question arising from such a scenario is: How are communities of faith across the religious divide supposed to react when laws demand that they act in ways that conflict with either their sacred text whether written or oral? The focus of this paper, therefore, is to simultaneously examine the place of religion in the public sphere as well as explore the impact of enacted laws on religion in Zimbabwe. This paper made use of public discourse, as presented in a WhatsApp group chat of a Bible Challenge Group which took place on 21 February 2021. Secondary sources were utilised in informing this paper's conceptualisation of religion and the law.