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Tradition in Religion and Law*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2015

H. Patrick Glenn
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Extract

To what extent can human legal thought be encompassed by the divine and share its character, or alternatively, stand free of the divine and constitute an autonomous field of normativity? Answers to these large questions may understandably differ, yet answers appear both necessary and important. If human legal thought is somehow brought within the divine, it may share its immutable character, and ossify. Islamic law, at least in its Sunni variant, may currently represent an example of this. If human legal thought stands free of divinity, it may be fundamentally lacking in authority. Examples are found in failed states, and perhaps elsewhere. The religions and laws of the world therefore provide answers, often nuanced, to the questions, and even correctives to the answers they provide. The debate turns around the notion of tradition.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , 2009 , pp. 503 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2009

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Footnotes

*

Revised text of remarks, entitled “Religions & Legal Traditions,” presented to a conference on “New Life in Traditional Ruins” of the Nordic Universities Network on Law, Religion and Ethics, Sigtuna, Sweden, January 10, 2008.

References

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4. Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality 289 (Schocken Books Inc. 1971) (“Not system but commentary is the legitimate form through which truth is approached”). For more nuanced views of Reform and Conservative Jewry, see infra § II.BGoogle Scholar.

5. Doctrinal consensus or ijma draws its divine character from the hadith. “My people will never agree to error.” Coulson, Noel, A History of Islamic Law 77 (Watt, W. Montgomery ed., Edinburgh Univ. Press 1964)Google Scholar. A distinction drawn between shari'a (the Qur'an and the hadith) as revealed truth and fiqh (doctrinal writing based on ijma as consensus and qiyas as analogy) as simply human construction would be “modernist” or “reformist” and of the 20th century. 1 Bleuchot, Herve, Droit Musulman 18, 19 (Presses Universitaires d'Aix-en-Provence 2000) (“to emancipate”)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7. Thiel, John, Senses of Tradition: Continuity and Development in Catholic Faith 3, 4, 10, 19 (Oxford Univ. Press 2000)Google Scholar.

8. See ¶¶ 9 and 10 (“Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God.…”), available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html.

9. Thiel, supra note 7, at 23 (“Catholics alone have been willing to count tradition as another revelational mode, however inseparable from scripture.”).

10. See, e.g., Brown, David, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford Univ. Press 1999) at 1 (“Christians must disabuse themselves of the habit of contrasting Biblical revelation and later tradition.”)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the position of some Christians other than Catholics in this sense, see infra § II.B.

11. Congar, Yves M.-J., Tradition and Traditions; An Historical and a Theological Essay 240, 296 (Naseby, Michael & Rainborough, Thomas trans., Macmillan Co. 1966)Google Scholar.

12. Dei Verbum, supra note 8, at ¶ 9.

13. Thiel, supra note 7, at 13 (emphasis added).

14 Espin, Orlando, Daily Life and Popular Religion, and Their Impact on Christian Tradition, in Futuring Our Past: Explorations in the Theology of Tradition 3 (Espin, Orlando & Macy, Gary eds., Orbis Books 2006)Google Scholar.

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16. Congar, supra note 11, at 287 (distinguishing however, “things as such” and their interpretation).

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18. See Simpson, A.W.B., Invitation to Law 23 (Blackwell 1988) (“law is essentially a tradition, that is to say something which has come down to us from the past”)Google Scholar; Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method 351 (Seabury Press 1988) (“tradition… something handed down”)Google Scholar; Phillips, Mark & Schochet, Gordon, Questions of Tradition xi (Univ. Toronto Press 2004) (tradition in philosophy, law “highly self-conscious bodies of ideas … transmitted over time”)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Catholic teaching, see supra § I.A.

19 Hart referred to such rules as “secondary” rules or rules of recognition but limited their operation in a legal system to designation of written primary rules, thus excluding all types of lex non scripta. Hart, H.L.A., The Concept of Law 95 (2d ed., Clarendon Press 1994)Google Scholar. He also envisaged the secondary rules as rules of explicit change and thus largely overlooked the slow process of adaptation and toleration of diversity inherent in the great religious legal traditions, including animist ones.

20. For the adaptability and dynamic of religious traditions, see Espin & Macy, supra note 14, at 15; Brown, supra note 10, at 25 (tradition can be “imaginative and innovative”), 31 (use of internal resources, past interacting with fresh stimulus), 107 (God constantly interacting with people throughout history); Lott, Eric J., Vision, Tradition, Interpretation: Theology, Religion, and the Study of Religion 31 (Waardenburg, Jacques ed., Mouton de Gruyter 1988) (each religious tradition functions as a “dynamic process”)Google Scholar.

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22. For references, see Glenn, supra note 2, at 192-93; and for Muslim schools confusing “the immutability of divine texts with the immutability of gloss,” Khan, supra note 6, at 133.

23. Shils, Edward, Tradition 6 (Univ. Chi. Press 1981)Google Scholar; and for the language of “modernity” emerging first in the twelfth century, following the Cluniac reforms, Berman, Harold, Law and Revolution 112 (Harv. Univ. Press 1983)Google Scholar.

24. Kronman, Anthony, Precedent and Tradition, 99 Yale L.J. 1029, 1065 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Duxbeury, Neil, Kelsen's Endgame, 67 Camb. L.J. 51passim (2008)Google Scholar.

26. Hart, supra note 19, at 114.

27. Fukuyama, Francis, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Cornell Univ. 2004)Google Scholar; Ghani, Ashraf & Lockhart, Clare, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Fixing a Failed World (Oxford Univ. Press 2008)Google Scholar.

28. Cf. Tuori, Kaarlo, Critical Legal Positivism (Aldershot 2002)Google Scholar; and for a “burgeoning group of normative positivists: those who defend a broadly speaking positivistic conception of law on normative grounds,” Coleman, Jules, Beyond the Separability Thesis: Moral Semantics and the Methodology of Jurisprudence, 27 O.J.L.S. 581, 600 (2007)Google Scholar. For Hart's failure to address “the question of why we need or value a legal system,” see Letwin, Shirley Robin, On the History of the Idea of Law 217 (Reynolds, Noel ed., Cambridge Univ. Press 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. See Glenn, H. Patrick, On Common Laws (Oxford Univ. Press 2005)Google Scholar.

30. von Gierke, Otto Fredrich, The Development of Political Theory 306 (Freyd, Bernard trans., W.W. Norton & Co. 1966)Google Scholar; and see, more recently, for tradition underlying national legal systems, Trakman, Leon, “Legal Traditions” and International Commercial Arbitration, 17 Am. Rev. Intl. Arb. 1 (2006)Google Scholar; Glenn, H. Patrick, “Doin “ the Transystemic: Legal Systems and Legal Traditions, 50 McGill L.J. 863, 882–85 (2005)Google Scholar.

31. See Shils, Edward, The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society 110 (Liberty Fund 1997) (“The free society must rest, once it comes into existence, on tradition”)Google Scholar; and see Wolfgang, ErnstBöckenforde, Recht, Staat, Freiheit 112 (Suhrkamp 1991) (“the liberal, secular state lives off the preconditions which it cannot itself guarantee”)Google Scholar, as cited in Murkens, Jo Eric Khushal, The Future of Staatsrecht: Dominance, Demise or Demystification?, 70 Mod. L. Rev. 731, 746 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Glenn, supra note 29, at 19 (“the way was thus open”); and further, Glenn, H. Patrick, The National Legal Tradition, in General Reports of the XVIIth Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law 1 (Boele-Woelki, K. & van Erp, S. eds., Bruylant/Eleven Int'l 2007)Google Scholar, reproduced in 11.3 Electr. J. Comp. Law (Dec. 2007), available at http://www.ejcl.org/113/articlel13-1.pdf.

33. Jacob, Robert, Le jugement de Dieu et la formation de la fonction de juger dans l'histoire europénne, 39 Arch. Phil. Dr. 87, 90 (1995)Google Scholar.

34. See supra text accompanying note 16.

35. While Orthodox Judaism embraces most fully the entire corpus of halakhah or Jewish law, Conservative Jewry would free itself from post-Talmudic statements and Reform Judaism would consider all of Jewish law to be of only persuasive and non-binding authority. On these and more subtle distinctions, Rotenstreich, Nathan, Tradition and Reality: The Impact of History on Modern Jewish Thought 112–14 (Davis, Moshe ed., Random House 1972)Google Scholar; Gordis, Robert, Jewish Tradition in the Modern World, in Tradition and Change in Jewish Perspective 154 ff. (Jamison, A. ed., 1978)Google Scholar; Sherwin, Byron, In Partnership with God: Contemporary Jewish Law and Ethics 42, 43 (Syracuse Univ. Press 1990)Google Scholar.

36. Luther, Martin, On the Councils and the Church (1539), in Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings 539, 555 (Lull, Timothy ed., Fortress Press 1989)Google Scholar.

37. For a view from the perspective of political history of Anabaptists as “fundamentalist” in outlook, “anarchists rather than revolutionaries,” see Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Vol. 2, The Age of Reformation 76, 77 (Cambridge Univ. Press 1978)Google Scholar. Even the view that Scripture is the only infallible authority is subject to radical interpretation since all must then be tested against Scripture, and someone must decide. If only Scripture can establish and substantiate articles of faith, Scripture is then “sufficient.” Althaus, Paul, The Theology of Martin Luther 5, 6 (Schultz, R. trans., Fortress Press 1966)Google Scholar. For Luther's doctrine, withdrawing from the church its character as a “visible, corporate, hierarchical, political and legal community” and becoming “a purely spiritual community,” see Berman, Harold, Law and Revolution II, at 40–41 (Belknap Press Harv. Univ. 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Luther's doctrine allowing him “to reject the claims of the Catholic authorities and cast doubt on the corpus of medieval theological thought,” see Dixon, C. Scott, Luther, Martin, in Encyclopedia of Christianity 716, 718 (Bowden, J. ed., Oxford Univ. Press 2005)Google Scholar. On the tension between Luther's adherence to “the catholic tradition's understanding of God” while subjecting “the papacy to Scripture,” see Kolb, Robert, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith 60, 91 (Oxford Univ. Press 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Skinner, supra note 37, at 113 citing Figgis.

39. For the United States, see U.S. v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965); for Canada, see Syndicat Northcrest v. Anselem [2004] S.C.R.551. The result is an expansion of the type of religious activity potentially falling under constitutional guarantees of freedom of exercise. Yet, this result is possible only once the notions of religious tradition, and religious legal tradition, have been reduced in significance in relation to the state. It is not, moreover, an inevitable result: In France, where such a process of “secularization” has occurred, only religions identifiable by a corpus of rules or precepts qualify for constitutional guarantees; where others are reduced to the status of “sects.” The normative force of religion is thus initially reduced, and then the concept of religion is further restricted through insistence on the existence of a (shrunken) corpus of norms. See generally Landheer-Cieslak, Christelle, La Religion Devant les Juges Français et Quebecois de Droit Civil (Biais, Yvon ed., Cowansville 2007)Google Scholar.

40. N. Hjelm, Lutheranism, in Encyclopedia of Christianity, supra note 37, at 719 and pointing out, at 721, that Lutheran churches “should be perpetually unsettled.” For later Protestant use of synods, presbyteries, conferences, councils and assemblies, though Luther and Calvin “appear to leave the question hanging,” it being “the superiority of scripture to tradition which is on their minds as they face Rome,” see Steinmetz, David, Luther and Calvin on Church and Tradition, in Gerhard Donnhaupt, The Martin Luther Quincentennial 98, 109 (Wayne State Univ. Press 1985)Google Scholar; and for Luther composing no new governing plans or Kirchenordnung for territorial churches though his colleagues actively engaged in doing so, see Kolb, supra note 37, at 159.

41. See generally Witte, J. Jr., Canon Law in Lutheran Germany: A Surprising Case of Legal Transplantation, in Lex et Romanitas: Essays for Alan Watson 181, 182–83 (Watson, Alan & Hoeflich, Michael H. eds., Robbins Collection Sch. L. 2000)Google Scholar; Witte, John, Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge Univ. Press 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harold J. Berman, The Interaction of Spiritual and Secular Law: An Historical Overview with Special Reference to Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Germany, in Lex et Romanitas, supra, at 149, 157-58; and for the Nordic countries, see Lutheran Reformation and the Law (Mäkinen, Virpi ed., Brill Academic Publishers 2005)Google Scholar.

42. Berman, supra note 41, at 158.

43. See supra § H.A.

44. Glenn, supra note 29, at 131 (referencing the law of the kingdom as law (dina demalkhuta dina) in Jewish law); 134-35 (referencing Islamic doctrine of aman or implied agreement of safe conduct with reciprocal obligation to abide by local law).