Religion in law
2005-06-23 16:55:13.873156+00 by
Dan Lyke
4 comments
Okay, one more, think of it as saving up for the weekend, as I hop on Amtrak this evening to go catch up with Charlene and get the hell out of town for a bit.
It takes about two days to complete the registration process for an account at New York Lawyer (their account confirmation email comes slooooowly), but they've got an interesting look at some of the current struggles to reconcile faith with law with logic:
"Faith challenges the underpinnings of legal education," Mr. Rudenstine
declared. "Faith is a willingness to accept belief in things for which
we have no evidence, or which runs counter to evidence we have."
He added, "Faith does not tolerate opposing views, does not acknowledge
inconvenient facts. Law schools stand in fundamental opposition to this."
That's David Rudenstine, Dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. In light of what I hope will be the discussion of Dominionism and Language down there, this should be put up against Jerry Falwell's work in opening up a law school, Liberty Law, whose Dean Bruce W. Green said on their web site:
"The soul-deep yearning of lawyers for meaning in their professional
lives has spawned a growing religious lawyering movement. All of
this points to the need for legal education's unapologetic return
to the transcendent principles upon which the Western legal tradition
and the rule of law were founded, and to the law of nature and divine
revelation found in the Holy Scriptures."
How he reconciles divine revelation with case law, I've no idea.
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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2005-06-23 18:32:43.460725+00 by:
petronius
[edit history]
Dean Rudenstine's comments are interesting, particularly since his school is explicitly affiliated with the Jewish faith. Indeed, if you look at US News' listing of the top 100 law schools in the US, about 13 of them are at religious univrsities, including Catholic (2 Loyolas, Villanova, Georgetown, Catholic University of America, etc.)Mormon (Brigham Young) and even Southern Baptist (Baylor). Now what a Jew considers faith is not necessarily what Dr. Falwell would, but the faith-based programs seem to be doing pretty good. Hell, if the Jesuits can pull if off anybody can.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-06-23 18:39:02.108244+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Not to steal the whole article, I didn't include this in the initial posting 'cause it made things too long, but the last paragraphs are:
Dean Lawrence Raful of Long Island's Touro Law Center, affiliated
with an Orthodox Jewish undergraduate program, doubted that strong
religious belief promotes valid debate.
"What fundamentalist people don't understand is that if they take
a stance based on religion, they're promoting a religious view,"
said Mr. Raful. "God created you to have an open mind. God gave us
free will to understand science and belief at the same time, and
He gave us some idea of how to live with the Ten Commandments,
and then I think He said something to us like, 'Good luck.'"
Remember this is coming from an Orthodox perspective. And one of the reasons the Jesuits are always getting into trouble with the Vatican is that they often value reality over faith.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-06-23 19:40:33.048185+00 by:
ziffle
I went to a sminar in Arizona last month, and one of the things we were shown was that the root word of 'belief' is the word 'lie'.
One guy started discussing real estate investing from the perspective of the anti-christ, and revelations, and such - I thought I would puke, and I just walked away mid sentence.
How do they get outr of bed in the morning?
#Comment Believe/lie made: 2005-06-23 21:55:00.959588+00 by:
td
The root word of 'belief' is the word 'lie'" Well, that's not true, as a minute spend browsing a dictionary would tell you (according to mine, lie comes from Middle English "lien" and Old English "leogan"; believe comes from Middle English "beleven" and Old English "beilyfan" and is related to OE "leof", meaning dear, from which "love" also derives). And even if it were, what kind of argument is that? Look up the etymology of "porcelain" and tell me what it says about your grandmother's feelings about her crockery. There's a
bunch of
interesting discussion of this sort of argument on
Language Log this week.