Biblical law is a complex concept that contains several distinct legal currents. In an effort to explore the interplay of these currents, this article first focuses on the overlap between the biblical law of God and the strictly legal regulations of the Old Testament. It then unpacks the principles and inner rationalities of what is termed “archaic law” and shows that this law is connected with regulations that could be termed “mercy laws” and with cultic regulations. By extrapolating the normative dynamics between these three codes of the law, the article exposes the enormous moral, religious, and legal influence of biblical law in general and of the mercy code in particular. In this way, the article reveals a backbone of our occidental culture. The interdependence of justice and mercy drives societies and cultures to search for (humane) justice in a deep and truth-bound way and, further, to routinize social care and welfare beyond the boundaries of families and tribal relations. The article finally illuminates both commonalities and differences between mercy and a deep and encompassing understanding of love.

Happiness is an essential goal of all people. Because happiness is so fundamentally part of our being, the question of how to attain it is of great importance. Buddhism has a long and well-developed philosophical and practical tradition with the goal of helping humans to attain happiness and end suffering. In this article, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama draws on the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition to explain how one can achieve happiness by transforming the mind. In particular, His Holiness explains how, in the Buddhist tradition, there is a special instruction called Mind Training, which focuses on cultivating concern for others and turning adversity to advantage that can be of great benefit to people seeking to end suffering and cultivate happiness.

This article considers the treatment of religious purposes in charity law from a liberal perspective informed by the work of the political philosopher Joseph Raz. The article begins by describing briefly the main ideas in Razian liberalism. It then considers the key question when thinking from a Razian perspective about the treatment of religious purposes in charity law: To what extent does the state's promotion of religious purposes via charity law promote the conditions of autonomy? Finally, the article considers the practical reasoning of state officials who deliberate about religious purposes in the charity law setting, asking to what extent such reasoning meets an ideal of public reason informed by Razian liberalism. The article concludes that in many, but not all, respects the treatment of religious purposes in charity law is consistent with Razian liberal commitments.

Critics argue that the politics of religious rights creates the problem of religious minorities instead of resolving it. The history of debate over conversion in India reveals that appeals to religious freedom can obscure and even suppress struggles against inequality and injustice.

In Buddhism, happiness is achieved when a person can perceive the true nature of reality, unmodified by the mental constructs we superimpose upon it. This authentic happiness comes from having an exceptionally healthy state of mind that underlies and suffuses all emotional states and that embraces all the joys and sorrows that come one's way. The mental states necessary for authentic happiness are not simply found or happened upon. Rather, happiness is achieved through mental training that purges the mind of afflictive emotions, such as hatred and compulsive desire, which literally poison the mind, and above all through the eradication of ignorance. This article discusses the Buddhist conception of happiness and its attainment. In particular, the article addresses the methods and practices that Buddhism employs to train the mind to achieve authentic happiness and the recent developments in contemplative neuroscience that complement and advance these methods.

Happiness has both universal and culturally specific forms. This article describes three sensibilities of happiness in Judaism: the prophetic life of struggle; the happiness of ashrei, with its life of simplicity in accordance with the will of God; and simchah, the life-lived-in-relationship given supreme expression in Moses's covenantal vision in the book of Deuteronomy. Focusing, in particular, on the social vision of Moses, the article explores how Jewish notions of happiness challenge contemporary conceptions of happiness grounded in materialism and acquisition, and it discusses how a focus on material happiness threatens to undermine relationships and the social fiber that is the thread from which true and lasting happiness is woven.

The academic discourse regarding welfare policy has generally been dominated by views focused on the distribution of resources and welfare. In recent years, another school of thought, known as “relational egalitarianism,” has emerged and shifted the focal point of social welfare policy from traditional redistribution to other aspects of social status. In this article, I will analyze a similar paradigm shift that occurred in the fashioning of the institution of the second tithe in the classical sources of Jewish law. The institution of the second tithe is ostensibly irrelevant to social welfare policy both from the internal perspective of Jewish law and from the external general-theoretical perspective. From the Jewish law perspective, it is not normally conceived of as an institution with a social-welfare goal, and from the general theoretical perspective, it seems to be an anachronistic institution that cannot enrich the modern theoretical discourse. In this article, I will try to expose the social role that was imbued in this institution through its reconstruction by the Sages. I argue that the concealed and indirect mechanism for the promotion of social goals may promote the social status of individuals in society more effectively than conventional social welfare mechanisms. In this respect, the reshaping of the second tithe may provide inspiration for enriching the arsenal of possible relational egalitarian social policy prescriptions.

The moral force and capacity for inspiration of both religion and politics alike arise in part from the sense that they authentically map the world as we find it, yielding claims about how it should be. This paper asks what role we might imagine for law in this “hyper-real” world of religion and politics, arguing that law can display distinctive virtues linked to its capacity for strategic agnosticism about the real. Applying Sunstein's idea of “incompletely theorized agreements” to the politics of religious freedom, the paper examines the role of law as a tool of adhesion in two very different constitutional settings—Canada and Israel—and argues for modesty as a functional virtue in law and legal process. Viewed in this way, law draws its worth from its tolerance for ambiguity, its sub-theoretical nature, and its pragmatic proceduralism, seeking to sustain political community in the presence of normative diversity, rather than speaking truth to difference.

In re A was decided by the English courts in 2000. Twin girls, named Jodie and Mary for purposes of the decision, were born joined together at their lower extremities. Jodie's heart and lungs were more or less healthy. But Mary's were insufficiently developed and could not provide her with the flow of blood and oxygen needed to survive. However, the girls shared a single circulatory system so that Jodie's heart pumped blood that flowed through both their bodies. In this manner, Jodie's heart and lungs kept Mary alive. According to the doctors, this situation could continue for a period of three to six months, or a bit longer, at the most. As the girls grew, Jodie would be unable to provide sufficient blood and oxygen to support both Mary and herself. Both would die. The doctors recommended surgical separation of the two girls. Mary would necessarily die “within minutes,” being cut off from her source of sustenance. Jodie would have a good chance of surviving. The legal issue presented was whether the doctors may perform the surgery that would cause Mary's death. At issue were questions concerning the scope of self-defense and necessity. In the course of the Court's opinions, brief reference was made to Jewish law. This article considers the Jewish law sources that bear on these issues.

This essay seeks to place happiness and sadness as values in their proper place in the Jewish legal tradition—as secondary concerns that are properly invoked and considered in cases where Jewish law is indefinite and unclear. This article provides a number of illustrative examples where such is done, and it then seeks to place happiness and its related values in their proper place in Jewish law as compared to other second-tier principles.

This article investigates the “pre-history” of the colonial and postcolonial personal (status) laws of India, which tie religious identity with legal status, particularly in matters of family law. It examines the concept of law and legal jurisdictions in Mughal India (1526-early eighteenth century; officially 1857): a unique political formation in which an Islamic state ruled over a populace which was predominantly non-Muslim. Using Mughal official orders, Persian-language legal documents produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and Persian-language legal formularies, the article proposes that despite frequent local delegation, the Mughals, their officials, and their subjects did not conceive of law as divided up into several religion-based jurisdictions. Instead, an inclusive operationalization of shariʿa1 (Islamic moral code, in a more specific sense Islamic law) appears to have popularized Islamic legal concepts and forms, and a host of pragmatic concerns attracted many who were not Muslims to the courts of the imperially appointed qazis (Islamic judges). Based on this evidence, this article proposes that Mughal India represents an instance of widespread “permissive inclusion” into shariʿa, whereby in non-criminal matters the qazis' courts allowed and attracted, but did not require, all Mughal subjects to avail of their civil jurisdiction. This proposition is examined further in connection with the acrid debates between late Mughal administrators (particularly, Muhammad Reza Khan of Bengal) and their British overlords. It is thus suggested that while instituting colonial rule in the late eighteenth century, British imperialists also introduced a new concept of religion-based distribution of legal authority to India.

Proponents of minority rights are calling for urgent measures to protect the Copts in Egypt, the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, and the Baha'i in Iran to secure religious diversity, shield minority populations from discriminatory practices, and prevent the outbreak of religious violence. State governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and international tribunals promote religious liberalization as the antidote to the violence and discord that is often attributed to these divisions. Enshrined in international agreements and promoted by a small army of experts and authorities, legal protections for religious minorities are heralded as the solution to the challenges of living with social and religious diversity. This article examines how the complexities and ambivalences of ordinary religious belonging are translated and transformed through the process of becoming legalized and governmentalized. It documents the risks of adopting religion as a category to draw together individuals and communities as corporate bodies that are depicted as in need of legal protection to achieve their freedom. The argument is developed through an extended case study of the legal status of the Alevis in Turkey, a community and a category formally constituted as a single whole as part of the Turkish nation-building project. It evaluates two legal constructions of Alevism by the Turkish state and the European Court of Human Rights. While premised on differing assumptions about Alevism, both erase the indeterminacy and open-endedness surrounding Alevism as a lived tradition embedded in a broader field of social and cultural practices, while bolstering the role of the state in defining and overseeing Turkish religiosities.

This article explores resources within the Christian theological tradition that recognize happiness in earthly life while also preparing Christians for ultimate happiness through union with God. Two resources explored in the article are the appreciation of happiness in Jesus's ministry and its engagement with Greek philosophy. After exploring these resources, the article turns to Aelred of Rievaulx, the great medieval theologian, to investigate how moral virtue, transcendent happiness, and earthly pleasure are harmonious parts of a holistic Christian vision of happiness. Finally, after examining Aelred's contribution, the article considers how this integrated view of happiness can help us to think through the problems of happiness in our lives today.

Rabbi Shlomo Goren was one of the leading rabbinic figures in religious Zionist circles. As the first chief Rabbi of the Israeli military, he had a unique opportunity to influence the development of the Israeli army and its policies. He needed to deal with questions that had no precedents in Jewish law. One of his challenges was the part international law played in the formation of a modern army. Rabbi Goren wished to give a halachic perspective to questions of international law, and to do that, he had to translate the language of international law, a field developed in the modern period, to halachic language. This process led him to evaluate moral positions that are part of international law and the ability of halacha to be part of the modern world.

The religious revival that followed the collapse of the USSR provides an excellent opportunity to compare the dynamics of projects of religious freedom with those of religious repression. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, this article documents the contradictory effects that both repressive and liberal policies and laws have on religious expression. Thus, while Soviet anti-religious policies undeniably caused much suffering and hardship, religious repression also contributed to an intensification of religious experience among certain Muslim and evangelical groups. And while religious freedom laws expanded the scope for public religious organization and expression, they also produced new inequalities between religious groups, as the cases of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan demonstrate. Ultimately, the article shows that the effects of liberal and repressive laws are far from straightforward and need to be analyzed in relation to the social context in which they are applied.

Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, usually referred to as al-Shabaab (the youth), is known primarily as a Somali terrorist group. But since the end of 2008, it has functioned as a state power in large parts of Southern and Central Somalia. In this article, I analyze the main legal body of the group: the qāḍī court. In order to establish law and order in their territories, al-Shabaab has applied their own version of sharī'a. The article reveals that al-Shabaab's application of criminal law follows the inherent logic of classical Islamic legal doctrines on several points. However, the al-Shabaab courts tend to overlook many of the strict requirements regarding evidence and procedure that were outlined by the medieval Muslim scholars in order to humanize Islamic law. Therefore, the legal reality of al-Shabaab's regime is far more brutal than that of most other Islamic-inspired regimes in the contemporary Muslim world. Al-Shabaab's practice of Islamic criminal law may be seen not only as a means to exercise control through fear but also as an effective way of filling the vacuum of insecurity and instability that has followed twenty years of violence and the absence of state institutions in its territories. I argue that, in order to understand al-Shabaab's current practice of criminal law, one has to take into consideration the group's jihadi-Salafi affiliation. According to Salafi notions, sharī'a is not only a means to an end, but an end in itself. As such, sharī'a (i.e., God's divine law) is the visual symbol of an Islamic state. Consequently, the application of Islamic criminal law, and especially of the ḥudūd punishments, provides al-Shabaab with political-religious legitimacy.