January 26, 2022

“Neutralizing Secularism: Religious Liberty and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”

Professor Rabiat Akande
Via Zoom

Register: https://bit.ly/LRSTJAN26

Contestations pitting the notions of secularism and religious freedom against each other are ubiquitous in the contemporary world. This tension was, in fact, integral to the making of the modern notion of religious liberty in the aftermath of the Second World War. Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the paradigmatic legal encapsulation of the modern notion of religious liberty, was the product of an impassioned contestation between a Protestant ecumenical movement keen on securing the prerogative to spread the gospel to the “non-Christian world” on the one hand, and, on the other, a secularism in a peculiar alliance with the colonial state in Muslim Africa, an area of the world that held immense attraction for the global missionary enterprise. Through the lens of struggles between global protestant missionaries, transnational Muslim elites, and imperial administrators, this talk offers an alternative history of the modern notion of religious liberty, intervening in debates over the history of human rights and its place in the genealogy of religious liberty and secularism.

Rabiat Akande is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, Islamic law and (Post)Colonial African law and society. Her forthcoming book is Constitutional Entanglements: Empire, Law and Religion in British Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press). 

The LRST is supported through the funds of the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law

December 3, 2021

“Jews, Justice, and U.S. Indian Law”

Professor David S. Koffman
Via Zoom

Register: https://bit.ly/LRSTDEC3

This talk analyzes the work of a cadre of American Jewish lawyers, civil servants and intellectual New Dealers who turned centuries-long anti-Indian policy on its head and created the most progressive pro-Native policy the U.S. had ever known. Drawing from extensive, original archival research, the talk situates the work of this generally unknown chapter of modern Jewish advocacy in the twin contexts of American religious minorities’ commitment to liberalism on the one hand, and the ongoing realities and impacts of colonialism on the other.

David S. Koffman is the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry in the Department of History at York University. He is the author of The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and the editor of No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging (University of Toronto Press, 2021). He serves as the associate director of York’s Israel & Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, and the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes.

The LRST is supported through the funds of the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law

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November 24, 2021 – Co-sponsored with the IFLS

“Unmasking the Hypocrisy of the Niqab Bans”

Dr. Miriam Zucker
Via Zoom

Register: https://bit.ly/Niqabban

In the last fifteen years many European countries have passed laws that ban the wearing of full-face Muslim veils in public places. In several cases reaching the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR),the court upheld such laws, based on the principle of “living together”. The ECtHR reasoned that the minimum requirements of life in society include the possibility of open interpersonal relationships, which it considered impeded by face-covering garments. Recently, the trend of banning these garments seems to have extended beyond the European continent. For example, Quebec’s “religious symbols” law obliges civil servants to carry out their functions without wearing religious face coverings.

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many jurisdictions have made facemasks mandatory in public transport and public institutions. While these laws have transformed our public spaces, it appears that we manage to ‘live together’ in these face-covered public spaces. Considering these developments, my talk will question the coherency of the Muslim face veil bans.

Miriam Zucker received her SJD degree from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law
and her LLM from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She researches the areas of Multiculturalism and Feminism, Law and Religion, and Constitutional Law, and she is the recipient of the Audre Rapport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2021). 

Organized by the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies and co-sponsored by the Osgoode Colloquium on Law, Religion & Social Thought

November 25, 2020

“In Your Face: Law, Justice and Niqab-Wearing Women”

Professor Natasha Bakht
Via Zoom

Register: bit.ly/LRSTNOV25 

“The niqab is incompatible with gender equality.” “Women are forced by the men in their families to wear the niqab.” “Wearing a niqab makes living together impossible.” This talk will examine such claims made by the majority to constrain the lives of a small minority. The rampant spread of legislation banning face veils globally has transformed niqab-wearing from a non-existent issue to a spectacular threat to the nation state. Even educated, sophisticated scholars and judges who claim to accept and even welcome diversity will “draw the line” at the niqab. Relying on interviews with niqab-wearing women from Ontario and Quebec, Bakht helps to refocus understandings of the niqab from the perspective of the wearer. Bakht then analyzes popular and legislative objections to the niqab, revealing their specious logic. By hearing some of the experiences of niqab-wearing women and analyzing objections and legal proscrip­tions of the niqab, the hope is that we might get to know niqab-wearing women and ourselves better.

Natasha Bakht is a full professor of law at the University of Ottawa and the Shirley Greenberg Chair for Women and the Legal Profession. Her research focuses on the intersection of religious freedom and women’s equality. Her new book In Your Face: Law, Justice and Niqab-Wearing Women in Canada (Irwin Law, 2020) analyzes niqab bans while also drawing on interviews with niqab-wearing women to reveal their complex identities and multiple motivations for dressing in this way. 

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October 21, 2020

“Buddhist Religious Freedom, in Victory and in Defeat”

Professor Jolyon Thomas
Via Zoom

Register: bit.ly/LRSTOCT21 

U.S. officials who occupied Japan after World War II claimed that the defeated country totally lacked religious freedom. However, this tidy narrative masked a messy history. Japan’s 1889 constitution had guaranteed religious freedom, and over subsequent decades Japanese clerics had fiercely debated and vigorously defended the religious freedom clause. Yet even as Buddhists in Japan generally used religious freedom to secure privileges for themselves while excluding “foreign” religions like Christianity, Japanese Buddhists living in the U.S. Territory of Hawai`i tried and failed to get the American guarantee of religious freedom to work for them. For example, although the landmark 1927 Supreme Court case Farrington v. Tokushige upheld the right of Japanese Americans to educate their children at Buddhist-operated language schools, racist depictions of Buddhism as “un-American” made it impossible for the plaintiffs to use religious freedom law in making their case. Thomas juxtaposes competing claims about religious freedom in the Japanese and U.S. empires to show that religious freedom is never simply present or absent in any given polity, nor has “it” ever been just one thing in any time or place.

Jolyon Thomas is Assistant Professor and Interim Graduate Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research on religion investigates media, law, politics, education, and capitalism in Japan and the United States. He is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2012).

In collaboration with:

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October 22, 2019

“Do Rivers Have Rights?  Indigenous Sovereignty on the Klamath River”

Dr Dana Lloyd (Washington University at St Louis)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027 Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp

This paper rethinks the notion of Indigenous sovereignty through the story of the Yurok Tribe of Northwest California and its ongoing efforts to heal the Klamath River, to which they refer as their “bloodline.” These struggles have taken different forms in different times in history: they range from the fish wars of the first half of the twentieth century, through administrative appeals to remove dams from the river in the early 2000s, to the recent resolution of the Yurok Tribal Council to recognize the Klamath River as a rights-bearing person.

Sovereignty means, in federal Indian law, the recognition of the Yurok treaty rights by US courts; but, perhaps more meaningfully, to the nation itself sovereignty means the ability of the Yurok Tribal Court to make decisions on Yurok everyday life based on traditional values, and with close attention to the river and its fish, that play a vital role in the economic, cultural, and spiritual identities of the Yuroks.

Dana Lloyd is a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a PhD in Religion from Syracuse University and an LLM from Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. She is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled A Hollow Freedom, on the US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988).

In collaboration with:

The Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University 

The LRST is supported through the funds of the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law

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March 5, 2019

“Rabbinic Law as Culture: How the Rabbis Transformed Jewish Law into a Way of Talking about Everything”

Prof Chaim Saiman (Villanova University)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2010 Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp

Though typically translated as “Jewish law,” the term “halakhah” is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its many detailed rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim that the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God—a claim no country makes of its law.  In this talk, and drawing on his recent book, Saiman will trace how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. In the world of halakhah everything is law, but law is also everything, such that even law that serves no practical purpose can provide surprising insights into timeless questions about the very nature of human existence.

Chaim Saiman is a Professor of Law at Villanova University.  Saiman’s work focusses on Jewish law, insurance law, and private law.  He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Hebrew University, and the University of Toronto, and has been appointed as an arbitrator on rabbinical courts and an expert witness in insurance law and Jewish law in federal courts.  He is the author of Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (Princeton, 2018).

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October 23, 2018

“Historicizing the Global politics of Religious Freedom”

Professor Matthias Koenig (University of Göttingen)
12:00pm to 2:00pm, Room 318 Jackman Humanities Building
Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp

Religion has become an increasingly salient marker of symbolic and social boundaries in nation-states across the world. In both immigration and post-colonial settings, state authorities and social activists struggle over the public recognition of religious differences and the accommodation of religious minorities. These struggles, whether inside or outside the courtroom, widely draw upon scripts of religious freedom and minority rights as institutionalized in constitutional and international law. In an attempt to historicize neo-institutional world polity theory, this paper scrutinizes the transregional entanglements in which these scripts emerged. Drawing on a relational dataset of bilateral treaties in the long 19th century, it describes how norms of religious freedom and minority rights, spreading through the network of sovereign states, were universalized and institutionalized in international law. It shows that this process was highly influenced by power configurations between empires, nation-states and social movements, including missionary organizations, ethno-religious minorities, and transnational associations. As these configurations have left traces in competing interpretations of global scripts, their knowledge is indispensable for understanding contemporary politics of religious difference.

Matthias Koenig is Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Göttingen and Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He has held visiting positions at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University. He has published widely on sociological theory, human rights, religion and immigrant integration; his most recent book is Religion and National Identities in an Enlarging Europe (co-edited with W. Knöbl & W. Spohn, Palgrave 2015).

In collaboration with:

November 21, 2018

“Reforming Islamic Family Law in Lebanon: A Political Anthropology of Religion”

Dr Jean-Michel Landry (McGill University)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027 Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp

What does legal activism tell us about the way Islamic family law is constructed and applied in the Middle East? Over the last decades, the problem of gender-based custody allocation has sparked intense mobilizations across the region. In Lebanon, Sunni and Shi‘i citizens led two parallel campaigns to modify the shari‘a-derived norms enforced in custody disputes. Their efforts produced perplexing results: while Sunnis Lebanese succeed in modifying the legislation, the Shi‘a failed to bring about even a modicum of change. How could two parallel campaigns mobilized around the same issue, launched in the same country, and executed at the same time produce such opposite results? By following courses of action taken by Sunni and Shi‘i activists, paying attention to their mistakes, failures and achievements, we gain a new perspective on the making of religion-based family law, and its entanglement with the legal grammar of secularism.

Jean-Michel Landry is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and an affiliated researcher at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016.  His work focuses on secularism, religion, gender and political anthropology. He received the 2016 Best Dissertation Award from the Association of Middle East Anthropology for his dissertation, entitled The Practice of Shi‘i Jurisprudence in Contemporary Lebanon.

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March 19, 2018

“Can We be Done with Original Sin: Political Theology, Legal Interpretation, and the Decision”

Prof Paul Kahn (Yale University)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 318, Jackman Humanities Building

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp

In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt wrote, “Every political idea in one way or another takes a position on the ‘nature’ of man and presupposes that he is either ‘by nature good’ or ‘by nature evil.'” Liberal political theory rejects the assertion that there is such a need “to take a position.” There is no need for a metaphysical predicate, because people are good enough to agree on reasonable terms by which to live together politically. In this talk, I recover a meaning for Schmitt’s line. and thereby demonstrate the continuing need for political theology. Schmitt had hold of the important idea that in law the most important decision precedes, rather than follows, interpretation. Decision is the condition of interpretation, not because morality precedes politics, but because every interpretation must take a position on the relationship of freedom to order. We must decide whether law is project or system, whether the sovereign is transcendent or immanent. A transcendent popular sovereign takes up law as a project; animmanent popular sovereign expresses law as system.

Paul Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and Director of the Orville H. Schell. Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Kahn works in the areas of constitutional law and theory, international law, cultural theory and philosophy and is the author of numerous books, including Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Columbia. 2011) and Making the Case: The Art of the Judicial Opinion (Yale, 2016).

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