Taking Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia as a focal point, the author argues that the legal framing of Indigenous sacred land claims in terms of religious freedom carries significant costs. It impels courts to bracket consideration of sovereignty and territorial rights, while positioning Indigenous worldviews as nonrational rather than as dynamic intellectual traditions and ways of life that are respectably different from those embodied in settler systems of law. Genuinely fair adjudication of such claims requires not religious exemptions from general laws but recognition of the sui generis rights of Indigenous nations in relation to lands they never ceded (acknowledging historical injustice); deep differences between dominant European settler and Indigenous cultures (acknowledging that settler law is also cultural); and the validity of Indigenous environmental philosophies (acknowledging that they are no less rational than Western ones).

A curious list from the Mishnah lists seven labors that a woman does for her husband. The juxtaposition of these seven tasks in a list creates a hierarchy among them, which dictates the order in which the performance of a task is transferred to an enslaved woman as the size of the woman’s dowry increases. Scholars read this text to understand how wealth shapes a woman’s labor obligations, but they have taken the form and contents of the list as a given. This article argues that the list establishes the category of wives’ work in rabbinic literature and defines it as work that is performed interchangeably by the wife or enslaved women. The form of the list can be compared to other lists within the Mishnah as well as lists of housework in contemporary traditions. These comparisons allow for a more critical stance toward the interplay of slavery and status in the Mishnah. The Mishnah’s framing of a wife’s work as interchangeable belies how the individual tasks were embedded in broader social, economic, and technological transformations.

In this article, we explore the status of Samaritans in early modern Ottoman Damascus through a focus on a particular firman—a sultanic legal decree. The firman orders that Samaritans—a religious group that traces its origins to ancient Israel but differs from Jews in several aspects—are not to be employed as clerks by Ottoman authorities. We argue that the firman indicates Ottoman officials engaged in religious status management despite the lack of legal terminology for minority in the document. The significance of the firman regarding conceptualizing status, we suggest, is that it points to an alternative model of minoritization that is not based in modern European legal approaches to religious minority status and law but which accounts for people’s experiences of minority status before modernity.

This article examines anti-mask protests in the United States in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, I look at the cultural (mis)appropriation of slogans by anti-mask protestors, such as “I can’t breathe” and “My body, my choice.” Noting that this is at first glance a bit of a puzzling phenomenon, I show that there is a relationship between the anti-mask protest, white Christian grievance politics, and the disintegration of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Bonnie Honig, I argue that the anti-mask protests represent a mode of opting out of public engagement, hence opting out of the practice of using rational argumentation to explain why things ought to be a certain way, as well as listening to the reasons of others. Insofar as this has become a popular mode of engagement among a significant number of Americans, it needs to be understood in the language of foregoing responsibility for others in US pluralistic democracy. Indeed, further explication of the relationship between responsibility and freedom is absolutely necessary. I maintain that opting out is ethically untenable because of the nature of interdependence with others and the necessity of adhering to the rule of law. An ethic of reciprocity properly grounds an understanding of embodied freedom, resisting the extremes of grievance politics.

The article explores the connection between the rule of law and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion from an empirical and theoretical perspective. The author posits that the two are not merely interdependent, but that freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is foundational for embedding the rule of law because a state needs to facilitate freedom of thought, conscience, and religion to encourage the exploration of virtue to inform consensus around society’s common norms. This virtue-building role of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion gives the human right its foundational role for creating the conditions required for embedding the rule of law. This conclusion is drawn from Martin Krygier’s analysis of the sociological conditions necessary to embed the rule of law and a comparison of the worldwide rule of law, religious freedom, and happiness indexes. To support a universal approach to the human right and to underpin the identified essentiality of it, the author proposes a theoretical approach grounded in the theory of common grace; Rowan Williams’s other-regarding communal approach to rights; and the framework for plural living together proposed by Herman Dooyeweerd. The author posits that this approach could be adapted with a plural metanarrative to accommodate dialogue around virtue building and dispute resolution within societies with very different outlooks.

Suppose that people seek confidentiality in what would otherwise be a public process—such as litigating or applying for a firearms license—because they are afraid that publicly identifying them will stigmatize them in their (or their families’) religious communities. Should the law allow them to proceed anonymously to better protect their interests and to avoid discouraging their lawsuits or applications? Or would that unduly stigmatize the religious community by branding it as improperly censorious or judgmental—or interfere with religious community members’ ability to evaluate for themselves how their coreligionists are using the courts and other government processes?

A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed that having specific legal rights did not perforce endow one with constitutional rights. Nevertheless, a handful of recent and high-profile disputes concerning Hindu temple deities and the growing influence of Hindu nationalist politics together suggest that the issue of deities’ rights is far from a settled matter. This article argues that declining to recognize deities’ constitutional rights accurately reflects dueling commitments in the Indian Constitution.