Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
The following syllabus was used for an upper-level course on Law and
Religion at UC-Santa Barbara in the spring of 2017. I prepared the course
knowing that my audience is likely to be comprised of Religious Studies majors
and pre-law students. I wanted to give a firm base for students who were
planning to apply to law schools within a year or two, but also to give students
an opportunity to use this course to enhance their understanding of religion
through the prism of law.
I also knew that in addition to this course I was assigned to teach course
entitled Religion, Law, and Society. My challenge was to consider what
elements of the connections of law and religion were conspicuously social, and
would be more fitting for that title, and vice versa. This division nicely correlated
with the structure of my first monograph, which I just recently published, which
stressed the discrepancy between legal notions and legal practice, by setting the
discussion of the two apart.
The course presents multiple introductions to the topic: the problem of
defining religion, and the problem of defining law; the relationship between
them; the religious sources of law and its secular sources; the duty to obey the
law, from both religious and secular perspectives. All these are just by way of
introduction, slowly approaching the realm of the law, as in Kafkas parable of
the Gatekeeper (which we read in the first class), and they last almost half the
course.
We then explored the concepts of intent, sin and crime, and punishment
from both legal and religious perspectives. The readings are intended to present
students with a vast array of scholarship, ranging from classic standards to the
most recent developments.
The discussions and the readings combined revealed to students a rich
religious residue at the heart of the legal system, and gave them tools for a
theoretical analysis of any given debate on church and state or connections of
religion and law, as demonstrated by their application of these debates in their
final papers.
LAW AND RELIGION
Aryeh Amihay
Details:
RGST 177
M W 5:00pm-6:15pm
Room: Arts 1356
All students are required to have one office hour meeting with instructor during the course.
Grades will not be submitted for no-show students.
Trakakis, Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?
Sources of Readings
Anderson, Gary A. Sin. A History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.
Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957.
Audi, Robert. Action, Intention, and Reason. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Barzilai, Gad. Legal Categorizations and Religion: On Politics of Modernity, Practices, Faith, and Power. In The
Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, edited by Austin Sarat, 392-409. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004.
Bellah, Robert N. Civil Religion in America. Daedalus 96.1 (1967): 1-21.
Berman, Mitchell N. The Justification of Punishment. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law, edited by Andrei
Marmor, 141-56. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Dan-Cohen, Meir. Harmful Thoughts. Essays on Law, Self and Morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Daube, David. The Deed and the Doer in the Bible, edited and compiled by Calum Carmichael. Philadelphia: Templeton
Foundation Press, [1962] 2008.
Davies, Brian. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: Clarendon and Oxford University Press, 1992.
Dworkin, Ronald. Law as Interpretation. Critical Inquiry 9.1 (1982): 179-200.
Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Clarendon and Oxford University Press, 1980.
Fletcher, George P. Basic Concepts of Legal Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, [1975]
1995.
Galanter, Marc. Cults. Faith, Healing, and Coercion, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gardner, John. Offences and Defences. Selected Essays in the Philosophy of Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007.
Garvey, Stephen P. Whats Wrong with Involuntary Manslaughter? Texas Law Review 85.2 (2006): 333-83.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
George, Robert P., ed. The Autonomy of Law. Essays on Legal Positivism. Oxford: Clarendon and Oxford University Press,
1996.
Greenawalt, Kent. Conflicts of Law and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon and Oxford University Press, 1987.
Gutmann, Amy, ed. Freedom of Association. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Hart, H. L. A. Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon and Oxford University Press, 1983.
Hayes, Christine E. Whats Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Kierkegaard, Sren. Fear and Trembling. A Dialectical Lyric. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, [1843] 1941.
Kugel, James L. The Bible as it Was. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1997.