Desanctification of law and the problem of absolutes / Jeremy Waldron -- The paradox of human rights discourse and the Jewish legal tradition / Suzanne Last Stone -- Sovereign imaginaries : visualizing the sacred foundation of law's authority / Richard K. Sherwin -- Dat : from law to religion : the transformation of formative term in modern times / Abraham Melamed -- Law as religion, religion as law : Halakhah from a semiotic point of view / Bernard S. Jackson -- Canonicity as a defining feature of legal and religious discourse : a programmatic essay / Daniel Reifman -- Exceptional grace : religion as the sovereign suspension of law / Robert Yelle -- A bad man theory of religious law (numbers 15:30-31 and its afterlife) / David C. Flatto -- Soviet law and political religion / Dmytro Vovk -- International law as evangelism / Kevin Crow -- "Enjoin them upon your children to keep" (deuteronomy 32:46) : law as commandment and legacy, or, Robert Cover Meets Midrash Steven D. Fraade 12 "Between Man and God" and "Between Man and his Fellow": Categories in Polemical Context Itzhak Brand 13 Christian feasts and administration of Roman justice in Late Antiquity / Silvia Schiavo -- Law as a problematic aspect of religion : Paul's skepticism in a broader Jewish context / Serge Ruzer -- When law meets theology : legality and revelation in the Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian traditions in the Abbasid period / Yishai Kiel.
Summary:
"The problem of absolutes" refers to the difficulty of grounding and defending absolute prohibitions in a legal system that is rationalized on the basis of means-ends rationality. (An example might be the difficulty in identifying an absolute prohibition on torture that is not susceptible to being reinterpreted, read down, or negotiated away.) In the present paper, I associate this difficulty in the first instance with Max Weber's account of the rationalization of law and the distancing of law from any sense of sacred or transcendent obligation. But other developments need to be considered as well. I argue that the problem is as much about morality as it is about law. The two-law and morality-develop together in a complementary way, and the problem of legal absolutes tends to be matched by a corresponding difficulty with moral absolutes, just as the desanctification of law tends to be matched by a desanctification of morality"-- Provided by publisher.
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