Release date: Oct. 31, 2002
Contact: Elaine Justice, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0643 or ejustic@emory.edu

Emory's Law & Religion Program Marks 20 Years of Pioneering Research, Teaching

Emory University's Law and Religion Program is celebrating its 20th anniversary this fall with two new research grants that are typical of its diverse profile: One project explores America's land bank authorities as community development tools; the other examines social justice philanthropies in Muslim societies. Research efforts like these are possible because the program has taken a far-reaching approach to scholarship and teaching that in the last two decades has altered the landscape of American legal education.

"The Law and Religion Program—as the premier program of its kind in the United States—has returned to legal education the legitimacy of research and study of law and religion as part of professional education," says Frank Alexander, professor of law and founder of the program.

The hallmark that established the program's visibility in both legal and religion circles is its multi-year research projects on issues that touch both public policy and international concerns. According to director John Witte, the program currently has six ongoing projects that have involved hundreds of scholars and have garnered more than $4 million in funding support from foundations such as The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Lilly Endowment Inc., and others.

The program's biggest and best-known foray into international research has been its decade-long series of projects covering topics from Christianity and democracy to religious human rights to proselytism. These investigations have resulted in 15 international conferences, scores of articles and more than a dozen books, including two forthcoming volumes on Russian religion and religious liberty, says Witte.

The academic center of these efforts is a rigorous joint degree course of study combining law with both master's- and doctoral-level religious studies in various specialties. The program's cross-listed courses are open to all law and graduate religion students regardless of whether they are joint majors. Courses are taught by a team of professors, many of them internationally known, who also manage formidable research agendas.

"The program is based on the belief that religion gives law its spirit and inspires its adherence to ritual, tradition and justice. At the same time, law gives religion its structure and encourages its devotion to order, organization and orthodoxy," says Witte, who also is Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics.     

From its beginning in 1982, "the Law and Religion Program reflected a commitment not only from the law and theology schools, but from the university as a whole, that interdisciplinary studies needed to be advanced," says Alexander. Some 53 faculty from across the university participate in the program's teaching and research.

"This was an area where we could begin to make a dramatic mark on academic and professional life," says Alexander. The program also received a boost in its first years with the recruitment of Harvard law professor Harold Berman, a scholar of Soviet/Russian and international law whose work on relationships of American law to history, religion and to laws of other nations is known worldwide.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, law schools generally were not open to discussion of law and religion except in the area of First Amendment and narrow church-state issues, says Alexander. The result was "shallow jurisprudence and shallow historical perspective in legal education."

For students of that era, "legal education was indifferent at best and hostile at worst to the rich relationship between faith and practice, law and religion," he says.

Students at Emory learn that law and religion share ideas such as fault, obligation and covenant; they also share methods such as ethics, rhetoric and interpretation of texts. "Law and religion also balance each other by counterpoising justice and mercy, rule and equity, discipline and love," says Witte. "This interaction gives these two disciplines their vitality and their strength."

The program is both ecumenical and comparative. Its major emphases are the religious traditions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity and the legal traditions of the Americas, Europe and Africa.

The program also encompasses a Religion and Human Rights Project, directed by Islamic law and human rights scholar Abdullahi An-Na'im, which has completed six years of work and two major research efforts supported by grants totaling $897,000 from Ford.

An-Na'im's current research includes an Islam and Human Rights Fellowship Program (www.law.emory.edu/IHR). Funded by a grant of $707,000 from Ford, the program is bringing Muslim scholars together from around the world to develop human rights scholarship and advocacy strategies.

As for the future, students and faculty are exploring a wealth of new issues. Other current law and religion research efforts include:

• a two-year set of studies of philanthropy for social justice in Muslim societies conducted in conjunction with the Center for Languages and Cultures in Jakarta, Indonesia, funded by Ford;

• an 18-month study of land bank authorities as tools for community development and affordable housing, funded by the Fannie Mae Foundation and Local Initiatives Support Corporation;

• a three-year investigation on "Law and Human Nature: The Teachings of Christianity," part of a six-year project funded by Pew and administered by the University of Notre Dame;

• a project on law, religion and the reformed tradition, funded by Lilly; and

• a three-year project on Jewish law, religion and family, funded by the Steinhardt Foundation of New York.

"The Law and Religion Program has made possible for law schools across the country to acknowledge that scholarly inquiry into matters of law and religion is indeed scholarship of the first order," says Alexander. "We turned the tide."

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