Institutionalizing Rights and Religion: Competing Supremacies

Leora Batnitzky · Hanoch Dagan

Mar 2017 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Modern statesmen and political theorists have long struggled to design institutions that will simultaneously respect individual freedom of religion, nurture religion's capacity to be a force for civic good and human rights, and tame religion's illiberal tendencies. Moving past the usual focus on personal free expression of religion, this illuminating book - written by renowned scholars of law and religion from the United States, England, and Israel - considers how the institutional design of both religions and political regimes influences the relationship between religious practice and activity and human rights. The authors examine how the organization of religious communities affects human rights, and investigate the scope of a just state's authority with respect to organized religion in the name of human rights. They explore the institutional challenges posed by, and possible responses to, the fraught relationship between religion and rights in the world today.

About the author

Leora Batnitzky is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her publications include Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (2006) and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (2011). She has been a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Tokyo, and New York University Law School.

Hanoch Dagan is the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and former dean of the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law and a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. Dagan has written over seventy articles in major law reviews and journals as well as five books including Reconstructing American Legal Realism and Rethinking Private Law Theory (2013) and The Choice Theory of Contracts (with Michael Heller, Cambridge, 2017).