Righting the Relationship between Race and Religion in Law has just been posted by my colleague
Nomi Stolzenberg USC Gould School of Law. It is a review essay on Eve Darian-Smith,
Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law (Oxford, Hart Publishing 2010). The essay is forthcoming in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2011. Here's the abstract:
This review discusses the interrelationship of race and religion in law, the subject of Eve Darian-Smith's new book, which seeks to rectify the neglect of religion in the study of race and law and the parallel neglect of race in studies of law and religion. Concurring with the book’s basic propositions, that the segregation of race and religion into separate fields of legal studies needs to be overcome and the religious origins of fundamental liberal legal ideas need to be recognized, I tease out different ways in which race and religion can be “linked” and religion can “play a role” in the development of modern law that are not fully parsed out in Darian-Smith's analysis. Applauding her attempt to integrate recent challenges to the long regnant "secularization thesis" into the study of race and law, I point out some unresolved ambiguities in those challenges and their implications for law.
