March 27-29, 2008

Re-describing the Sacred/Secular Divide: The Legal Story

Scholars of law, humanities, and the social sciences will examine modern intersections between law and religion in society and culture. Topics will include reappraisals of theories and histories of secularization, reconsiderations of the impact of secularization on religion and on law, and examination of the particular effects of the modern legal regulation of religion on actual religious and legal ideas, practices, and people. Panels beginning at 8:00 am are intended for workshop participants, although others are welcome to attend. The 4:00 pm panel, Challenges of Studying Legal Secularism Today with José Casanova, David Engel, and Winnifred Sullivan, is designed for a broad audience. Reception at 6:00 pm with all workshop participants. For full description of workshop, see details.

Program

Thursday, March 27
6:00 pm	Opening dinner and remarks (for workshop participants only)
	Lynn Mather,Director, Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, Winnifred Sullivan, Law, University at Buffalo, and Robert Yelle, History, University of Memphis
Friday, March 28
8:00 am	Coffee and pastries
8:30 am	Panel I Moderator: Robert Yelle, History University of Memphis
	Elizabeth Mensch, Law, University at Buffalo, The Sacred and the Secular in Christian Theology
	Bruce Rosenstock, Religious Studies, University of Illinois, Law and Religion v. Political Theology
	Richard Sherwin, New York Law School, Law, Metaphysics and the New Iconoclasm
	Rachel Weil, History, Cornell University, ’Papists and other Disaffected Persons’: The Problem of Catholic Allegiance in the Revolution of 1688
10:15 am	Break
10:30 am	Panel II Moderator: Winnifred Sullivan, Law, University at Buffalo
	Rebecca French, Law, University at Buffalo, God in Your Briefcase
	Jonathan Sheehan, History, University of California, Berkeley, Laws of Sacrifice
	Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, Law, University at Buffalo, Sacrifice Beyond Law and Ritual
	Robert Yelle, History, University of Memphis, Freedom of (from?) Religion and the Repudiation of Ritual in the Early Modern Period
12:15 pm	Lunch (for workshop participants only)
1:30 pm	Panel III Moderator: Robert Yelle, History University of Memphis
	Cassie Adcock, History, Religious Studies, Washington University, Religious Freedom and Religious Proselytizing in Colonial North India
	Mary Anne Case, Law, University of Chicago, Why Evangelical Protestants are Right When they Claim that State Recognition of Same-Sex Marriages Threatens their Marriages and What the Law Should do about it
	Leonard Kaplan, Law, University of Wisconsin, A Taxonomy of Political Theologies
	Tomoko Masuzawa, History, Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, Between Comparative Religion and Comparative Jurisprudence: Space of the Secular in the 19th Century
4:00 pm	General Presentation and Discussion
	The Challenges of Studying Legal Secularism Today
	José Casanova, Sociology, Georgetown University
	David Engel, Law, University at Buffalo
	Winnifred Sullivan, Law, University at Buffalo
6:00 pm	Reception - UB faculty and graduate students are invited to meet workshop participants and engage in informal discussion
Saturday, March 29
8:00 am	Coffee and pastries
8:30 am	Panel IV Moderator: Winnifred Sullivan, Law, University at Buffalo
	Hussein Agrama, Anthropology, University of Chicago, Islamist Lawyers and the Emergency Egyptian State
	José Casanova, Sociology, Georgetown University, Modern Profanations: the Sacralization of the Secular and the Sacralization of the Individual
	David Engel, Law, University at Buffalo, Thai Buddhism and Modern Legal Consciousness
	Noah Salomon, Divinity School, University of Chicago, The Ruse of Law: Legal Equality and the Problem of Citizenship in a Multi-religious Sudan
10:15 am	Break
10:30 am	Panel V Moderator: Robert Yelle, History, University of Memphis
	Tim Jensen, Religious Studies, University of Southern Denmark, When is a Knife a Knife? Blasphemy Blasphemy and Religion Religion? – and When Not and Who Decides?
	Greg Johnson, Religious Studies, University of Colorado, Genealogy, Legal Categories and the Limits of Articulation
	Jack Schlegel, Law, University at Buffalo, On Oblique Perspective, Perhaps
	Winnifred Sullivan, Law, University at Buffalo, We are all Religious Now: The New Religious Universalism
12:30 pm	Lunch/wrap-up/planning for future

Organizers

Winnifred Sullivan, Law, University at Buffalo, and Robert Yelle, History, University of Memphis

Participants

Cassie Adcock, History, Religious Studies, Washington University
Cassie Adcock is Assistant Professor of South Asian Studies and Religious Studies, Department of History, Washington University in St. Louis. Her current research situates a prominent north Indian organization for nationalist and religious reform - the Arya Samaj - within a wider context of changing interpretations of religion, religious freedom, and the secular state at the turn of the twentieth century.

Hussein Agrama, Anthropology, University of Chicago
Hussein Agrama is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. He earned his PhD in 2005 at John Hopkins University. Professor Agrama’s research focuses on the anthropology of law, religion, Islam, and the Middle East; and in secularism, law and colonial power, and the genealogies of sovereignty and emergency states.

José Casanova, Sociology, Georgetown University
José Casanova is Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. Previously, he served as Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York for twenty years. He has published widely in the areas of sociological theory, religion and politics, transnational migration, and globalization. His most important work, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994) has appeared in Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Arabic editions and is forthcoming in Indonesian. He is presently working on two main projects, "Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective" and "Transnational Migration, Transnational Religion and Diversity."

Mary Anne Case, Law, University of Chicago
Mary Anne Case is Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Harvard Law School. Professor Case teaches in the area of feminist jurisprudence, constitutional law, European legal systems, marriage, and regulation of sexuality. While her diverse research interests include German contract law and the First Amendment, her scholarship to date has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality, and on the early history of feminism.

David Engel, Law, University at Buffalo, SUNY
David M. Engel is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Director of International Programs for the University at Buffalo Law School. Professor Engel's research deals with law and society in the United States and in other countries, particularly Thailand, where he has lived, worked, and taught over a period of nearly thirty-five years. He has studied litigation, conflict, and legal consciousness in communities in the American Midwest and in Thailand. In addition, he has conducted research on the effects of Special Education Law on the families of children with disabilities and their interactions with school district administrators. With his colleague, Frank W. Munger, he published Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans with Disabilities (University of Chicago Press, 2003), dealing with the effects of legal rights created by the Americans with Disabilities Act on the lives and careers of men and women with disabilities. He is currently engaged in an interview-based study of injuries and social change in Thailand. A theme common to all of his research is the significance of cultural practices and legal consciousness for the workings of law and legal institutions.

Rebecca French, Law, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Rebecca Redwood French is SUNY Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo Law School. She has written extensively on the Tibetan legal system as well as religious cosmologies and how they affect legal systems. Her work is situated at the intersections of law, anthropology, legal theory, religious studies and Buddhist legal systems. More recent interests have included the location of time in the law, the U.S. Supreme Court’s views on religion and postmodern theory and an analysis of 1,000 recent cases in religion to decipher current trends. Some of her more recent articles include: "Shopping for Religion; the Change in Religious Practice and its Importance to Law" (Buffalo Law Review, 2003); "Tibetan Law" (Legal Systems of the World, 2002); "Time in the Law" (Colorado Law Review, 2001), and "A Conversation with Tibetans? Reconsidering the Relationship between Religious Belief and Legal Discourse," (Law and Social Inquiry, 2001).

Tim Jensen, Religious Studies, University of Southern Denmark
Tim Jensen is Associate Professor of Comparative Relgion, Department for the Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark. Jensen has written, edited and contributed to numerous publications in Danish and English in various fields of the study of religions, e.g. theory and method; ancient Greek religion; religion in the media and public discourses; religion education; religion, ecology, and ethics; Islam and other minority religions in Denmark; religious pluralism and recognition of religion in Denmark; historical, constitutional and legal frameworks. Tim Jensen is Secretary General of the IAHP, the International Association for the History of Religions.

Greg Johnson, Religious Studies, University of Colorado
Greg Johnson is Assistant Professor and Graduate Director, Department of Religious Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder. His research pertains to contemporary American Indian and Native Hawaiian religious and legal struggles, with particular attention to repatriation politics. Johnson's recent publications include Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition (University of Virginia Press, 2007), and "Narrative Remains: Articulating Indian Identities in the Repatriation Context," Comparative Studies in Society and History (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Leonard Kaplan, Law, University of Wisconsin
Leonard Kaplan is Mortimer M. Jackson Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He has taught in the areas of jurisprudence, legal process, law, theology and state, civil procedure, criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence, as well as offering seminars in such subjects as Child, Family and the State, Law and Psychiatry, and Law and Literature. Professor Kaplan is also on the faculty of both Jewish and Religious Studies and is on the Steering Committee for Religious Studies. He has co-edited six books and written over thirty articles. Kaplan was a co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of a journal, Graven Images: Studies in Culture, Law and the Sacred, and is the director of the Law School's Project for Law and the Humanities. He also has been a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry since 1977. Professor Kaplan has an international reputation in the law and mental health field and is regularly invited to conferences both in the United States and abroad. He was one of three special consultants to the Final Report of the Enquiry on Research Ethics submitted by Professor David Weisstub to the Ministry of Health for Ontario, Canada.

Tomoko Masuzawa, History, Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
Tomoko Masuzawa is Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the history of the human sciences in the 19th and 20th century, particularly the European academic discourses on religion. She is the author of In Search of Dreamtime: the Quest for the Origin of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Professor Masuzawa is currently working on a book-length study exploring the condition of secularity in the development of biblical studies in the 19th century, tentatively entitled "The Promise of the Secular: William Robertson Smith and the Historical Constitution of Biblical Studies." Other publication projects underway include: a study of the transformation of European conceptions of religion, from "customs and ceremonies" to "belief systems," with a special attention to Bernard Picart's engravings in Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses des tous les peuples du monde (1723-37) and their reproduction and recirculation in the 19th century. She is also editing a volume entitled Genealogies of the Study of Religion.

Elizabeth Mensch, Law, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Elizabeth Mensch is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo Law School. She has written on the dialectical relationship between Christian Theology and the Western legal tradition as that relationship has developed in history and has played itself out in the current cultural context. Particular interests have included the emergence of market theory, the influence of St. Augustine, and the role of religion in the American colonies. She has served for a number of years as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Law and Religion.

Bruce Rosenstock, Religious Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bruce Rosenstock is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his PhD in Classics at Princeton University. Professor Rosenstock’s recent publications include: New Men: Converso Religiosity in the Fifteenth Century, a monograph dealing with the two most important converso Churchmen of 15th-century Spain, (Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, series ed. Alan Deyermond, 2003); "Mourning and Melancholia: Reading the Symposium" (Philosophy and Literature, 2004); and "Capra Contra Schmitt: Two Traditions of Political Romanticism" (Theory & Event, 2005). Currently, Professor Rosenstock is a Fellow of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities where he is working on a book entitled Philosophy and the Jewish Question: From Mendelssohn to Cavell.

Noah Salomon, Divinity School, University of Chicago
Noah Salomon is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on Islamic piety movements in contemporary Sudan. His dissertation is an analysis of debates between Sufi and Salafi Muslims in Sudan on questions of epistemology, emotion, and history, and in relation to the Islamizing (and then de-Islamizing) Sudanese state. He has also had a sustained interest in the topic of Islamic law and the protection of human rights which emerged out of hands-on experience working for a Sudanese legal aid society.

Jack Schlegel, Law, University at Buffalo, SUNY
John Henry Schlegel is a Professor of Law and Roger and Karen Jones Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo Law School where he has been a faculty member for nearly 35 years. He spent the first 25 of those years working on the history of American legal education and American legal theory. For the past ten years he has tried a new career as a scholar of law and economy in the forties, fifties and early sixties, with a particular focus on Buffalo.

Jonathan Sheehan, History, University of California at Berkeley
Jonathan Sheehan is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe, with particular interest in the history of religion, science, and scholarship. Other areas include the history of secularism and secularization, Jewish-Christian relations, the history of the disciplines, the afterlife of the Protestant Reformation, and the history of reading and print culture. His publications include The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton University Press, 2005), winner of the George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association for Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2005.

Richard Sherwin, Law, New York Law School
Richard Sherwin is Professor of Law and Director of the Visual Persuasion Project at New York Law School. He has written widely on the interrelationship between law and culture, including interdisciplinary works on law and rhetoric, discourse theory, political legitimacy, and the emerging field of cultural legal studies. He gained nationwide attention with his book, When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2000), which explores the impact of visual communication technologies on the theory and practice of law. Relevant recent works (available from SSRN) include: "Sublime Jurisprudence: On Educating the Legal Imagination in Our Time," Chicago-Kent Law Review (forthcoming 2008) and "Law, Metaphysics, and the New Iconoclasm," in Law Text Culture (Andrew T. Kenyon and Peter D. Rush ed., 2007).

Winnifred Sullivan, Law, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo. As a lawyer and a scholar of comparative religions, she writes about the phenomenology of religion in modern legal contexts. Professor Sullivan's most recent book is The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, Law, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Mateo Taussig-Rubbo is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He is an anthropologist, and recently completed the dissertation for his doctoral degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Taussig-Rubbo earned his JD at Yale Law School in 2001 and practiced in the area of cross-border transactions at a New York City firm. Professor Taussig-Rubbo's research focuses on such anthropological concepts as gift, sacrifice and consecration as they apply to modern political and legal situations.

Rachel Weil, History, Cornell University
Rachel Weil is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, specializing in Early Modern England. She is the author of Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714 (Manchester University Press, 1999), and several articles.

Robert Yelle, History, University of Memphis
Robert Yelle is Research Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Memphis. He has published widely in religious studies journals as well as in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. He has just completed the manuscript for his second book, The Disenchantment of Language: Protestant Literalism and the Discourse of Modernity from England to India, with the assistance of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Professor Yelle's current research focuses on the secularization of law in early modern Britain and colonial India.

Nearby Accommodations

Baldy Center For Law & Social Policy
511 O'Brian Hall, University at Buffalo Law School
Buffalo, NY 14260
716-645-2102

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