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.

In collaboration with:

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).

In collaboration with:

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February 7, 2018

“Merely Political or Meaningfully Religious? Indigenous Protest Rituals and Their Legal Afterlives”

Prof Greg Johnson (University of Colorado)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

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

Standing near the summit of Mauna Kea, two stone ahu (altars) are sites of contemporary Native Hawaiian religious vitality.  The State of Hawai`i, however, has a problem with the ahu.  Specifically, they sit on the proposed site of a $1.4 billion dollar telescope project and were ritually constructed in the course of protest actions against the project in 2015.  The State has deemed the altars “merely political” and therefore not deserving of consultative consideration or protection.  Now, as part of their ongoing effort to protect the mountain, some Hawaiian petitioners are challenging the State in the Supreme Court, insisting that the altars are manifestations of a long-held tradition.

Johnson will address this dispute, including his role as a witness in it, asking: What can be learned from cases wherein modern conceptions of jurisdiction and static notions of religion conflict with place-based forms of religious expression, especially those that emerge in protest settings?  Johnson will sketch several comparative examples of such impasses, including the role of prophecy at Standing Rock.  His presentation will conclude with an invitation to the audience to think about implications of such cases for Canadian contexts.

Greg Johnson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Interim Director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Colorado.  Johnson’s work focuses on the intersection of Indigenous traditions and law, with attention to repatriation, burial protections, and sacred land claims in Hawai`i and American Indian contexts.  He is co-editor of the Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s) (Brill, 2017).

In collaboration with:

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November 1, 2017

“Finding Religion: Assessing Religion-Based Asylum Claims”

Dr Helge Årsheim (University of Oslo)
2:30pm to 4:00pm, Room 2010, Osgoode Hall Law School

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

Asylum seekers around the world frequently base their claims for protection on religious conversion leading to persecution.  This raises a number of difficult issues, including how courts and tribunals understand religious conversion, how they assess available country of origin information, review the contents of religious convictions, and distinguish between sincere and insincere conversions.  More generally, it raises the issue of the relationship between freedom of religion or belief in international law and religious persecution under the 1951 Refugee Convention.  
This talk provides an overview of these issues, drawing on a case study of 70 appellate court cases on asylum claimants alleging religious conversion in Norway and Canada between 2010 and 2015.

Helge Årsheim is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at The University of Oslo. His research explores the ways in which religion travels across different levels of governance in international and domestic legislation and jurisprudence. His first book, Making Religion at the United Nations, will be published by DeGruyter in 2018.

In collaboration with:

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March 8, 2017

“Institutional or Individual: What is Religious Freedom in the United States Today?”

Professor Leslie C. Griffin (UNLV)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

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

This paper will argue that the U.S. government has usually interpreted religious freedom to protect institutions and frequently ignored the interests of religious individuals. Interpreting the Free Exercise Clause to protect religious institutions’ rights against their members ignores the experience of the earliest Americans. Allowing the courts to enforce a rule that automatically favors religious institutions over their members is at odds with the early history of liberty of conscience.

This talk will look at two examples of the courts privileging institutions over individuals. First, the ministerial exception allows church employees’ claims against their employers to be dismissed without lawsuit. Second, RFRA (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act) permits religious employers to deny full health insurance coverage to their employees.  The talk then explores the alternative, individual approach to law and religion, which the courts should favor in the future.

Leslie C. Griffin is the William S. Boyd Professor of Law at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law. She
holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. The fourth edition of her textbook, Law and Religion: Cases and Material, was published recently by Foundation Press. It is described at http://www.griffinlawandreligion.com/.

In collaboration with:

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October 5, 2016

“Buddhism, Constitutionalism and the Limits of Law”

Dr. Benjamin Schonthal (University of Otago)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

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

Like approximately half of the world’s basic laws, Sri Lanka’s constitution gives preferential status to the country’s majority religion, Buddhism. While this arrangement seems to place public law in the service of Buddhism, what have been the actual, legal effects on the lives of individual Buddhists? This talk considers this question and uses Sri Lanka as a case study for thinking more broadly about the nature and effects of religious supremacy clauses in constitutions around the world.

Ben Schonthal is Senior Lecturer in Buddhism and Asian Religions at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. He teaches and writes about the intersections of religion, law and politics in South and Southeast Asia. His first book, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law will appear with Cambridge University Press in October 2016.

Read the talk here:

Schonthal LRST Talk

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November 2, 2015

“The Everyday Life of Religious Difference: Governing Religion in Quebec”

Prof. Amélie Barras (York University)
12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP Required: www.bit.ly/osresearch, Event Code: LRST12

In 2007 during a public audience of the Bouchard-Taylor commission, Gerard Bouchard, one of the commissioners, asked a Moroccan association, whether and how frequently they asked for religious accommodations. His question is a good illustration of how religious minorities, and in particular Muslims, in and outside Quebec, are increasingly imagined as making requests for religious accommodations. 

What is the impact of this discourse of request on how we think about religion and religious pluralism? This talk discusses how this discourse carries expectations regarding the forms Islam takes in Canada, as well as how Muslims should act and perform their faith. Focusing on Quebec, it explores to what extent this discourse reflects and influences the everyday experience of devout Muslims. Ultimately, the talk argues that this discourse overlooks the complexity of how they work out, with themselves and with others, their religious practices and commitments.

Amélie Barras is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University.
Her research considers the relationship between politics, religion, gender and law in and beyond Canada. She is the author of Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey: The Case of the Headscarf Ban (Routledge, 2014).

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