2003Law and Religion

The Law and Religion Program at Emory University is designed to explore the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the interaction of legal and religious ideas and methods. The program is predicated on the belief that religion gives law its spirit and inspires its adherence to ritual, tradition, and justice. Law gives religion its structure and encourages its devotion to order, organization, and orthodoxy. Law and religion share such ideas as fault, obligation, and covenant and such methods as ethics, rhetoric, and textual interpretation. Law and religion also balance each other by counterpoising justice and mercy, rule and equity, discipline and love. This dialectical interaction gives these two disciplines and dimensions of life their vitality and their strength.

Established in 1982, the Law and Religion Program provides students and faculty with unique forms and forums of interdisciplinary study. Through a variety of specialty courses and clinics, projects and publications, colloquia and conferences, the program seeks to cultivate integrated forms of knowledge and holistic understandings of the legal and religious professions. The program is ecumenical and comparative in perspective, with emphasis on the religious traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and the legal traditions of the Atlantic continents.

The Law and Religion Program is part and product of the broader vision of Emory University to promote interdisciplinary inquiry and international initiatives in the context of a classic liberal arts education. Supplementing the traditional curriculum, several university programs join together students and faculty from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. These include, alongside the Law and Religion Program, the Center for Ethics and Public Policy in the Professions, the Institute for Liberal Arts, the Halle Institute for Global Learning, the Aquinas Center for Theology, Women's Studies, Violence Studies, African-American Studies, and area studies programs on Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe. A number of these initiatives are now confederated with the Law and Religion Program into Emory's new Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion.