Emory University School of Law: Law and Religion Program

The Law and Religion Program offers several cross-listed courses that allow joint degree candidates as well as other students to
explore discrete themes in this interdisciplinary field. Regularly offered courses, which collectively draw 300-400 students per year, include:

Civil Rights Litigation - An historical consideration of civil rights litigation strategies both before and after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This course will survey the growing scholarly debate about Brown and discuss other education cases.
Religion and Human Rights - This course will explore the problematic, yet unavoidable, relationship between religion and human rights in global comparative perspectives. The course will begin with a preliminary discussion of two main themes of religion and human rights. On the one hand, these opening sessions will seek to clarify the relationship between religion, broadly defined,
and culture, ideology, state and politics in different contexts. On the other hand, these early sessions will also examine the
nature, origins and development of human rights in philosophical, political and legal terms. Against this background, we will
focus on possibilities of mediating the tension between religion and human rights in general, mainly in terms of debates about the
universality and cultural/contextual relativity of human rights. The rest of the course will be devoted to a series of thematic
studies of such issues as the human rights of women, scope and implications of freedom of religion in national and international contexts. While attempting to maintain a broad, comparative perspective on several major religious traditions in both Western
and non-Western settings, the course will have a special focus on Islam and Islamic/African societies.
The Constitution and Human Rights - In the last half century, in the course of interpreting the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme
Court has addressed many issues that are now widely understood to be, at least in part, "human rights" issues. This course will evaluate how well - or how poorly - the Court has resolved several such issues, sometimes by looking at how other courts in other jurisdictions (e.g., Canada), have resolved similar issues.
Child Advocacy: The Law, The Policy, and the Players - This course will explore the various factors that shape policies affecting abused and neglected children, including: the requirements of federal laws and regulations; the perspective of different disciplines working on these issues; public perceptions; and media coverage. Course will cover the role of the following professions in the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of child abuse and neglect cases as well as their role in the juvenile court process: medical, legal, law enforcement, social work, public health. Course will cover the role of federal, state, and local agencies and
non-governmental organizations in addressing the needs of abused and neglected children and their families. Students will learn
to identify and use resources from other disciplines to enhance their legal skills and will learn to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of legal, legislative, and policy measures as a response to child abuse and neglect.
Comparative Legal History - The Western Legal Tradition - This is a course for students who want to "think big" about the law. It combines the traditional disciplines of comparative law, legal history, and legal philosophy. The underlying purpose is to provide perspective for understanding what our law is by studying what it has been and what it is tending to become. A major theme is the intimate connection between a legal system and the foundational belief-system that underlies it. A second related theme is the interaction of evolution and revolution in the Western legal tradition - (a) its origin in the Papal Revolution of the late 11th and 12th centuries which freed the ecclesiastical hierarchy from secular royal, feudal and tribal control and created the first modern legal system, the canon law, and (b) its survival through subsequent periodic transformations under the impact of great political and religious ("ideological") revolutions: the German Lutheran monarchical revolution of the 16th century, the English Calvinist aristocratic revolution of the 17th century, the French and American Deist democratic revolutions of the 18th century, and the Russian atheist socialist revolution of the 20th century. A third major theme is the crisis of the Western legal tradition in the 20th and 21st centuries, due partly to tendencies toward total statism in Western nations and partly to the challenges of non-Western cultures and relativist ideologies in an emerging world society. Among particular topics to be examined are the role of the legal profession and legal education in shaping legal institutions, techniques of legal development through case law and codification,
and other matters relevant to the structure and development of legal institutions.
American Constitutional Law: Religious Liberty - An exploration of the historical formation and current judicial interpretations of
the First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty.
Canon Law - A survey of the history of Catholic canon law, and its contributions to Western constitutionalism, family law, just
war theory, and other topics.
Federal Housing Policy and Homelessness - An analysis of federal and state housing and homelessness policies and of the religious and legal sources of the right to housing -- with clinical placements in homelessness agencies.
History of Church-State Relations in the West - An exploration of the interaction between ecclesiastical and political authorities in Roman, Medieval, and Reformation Europe and in colonial America.
Islam and Politics - An examination of issues of secularism and Islam in the modern context, with emphasis upon themes of
human rights and cultural transformation.
Islamic Law - An introduction to the basic concepts and institutions of Islamic law, the foundation for the legal system of many countries where Islam is the religion of the majority.
Jewish Law - A survey of Jewish law principles that address difficult legal issues and a comparison of these principles to those of American law.
Law and Theology - An exploration of the moral assumptions concerning human nature and the nature of community as reflected
in the purpose and function of law.
Law, Religion, and the Family - A seminar on the religious sources and dimensions of Western norms of sex, marriage, and
family life.
Western Legal Tradition - A comparative study of the successive transformations of Western law from the 12th to the 20th centuries, with emphasis upon the religious sources and dimensions of law.

Joint degree candidates are encouraged to take these courses as well as to pursue directed research projects on discrete law and religion themes under the supervision of Program faculty.