Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Conference: Status and Justice in Law, Religion and Society

A conference on “Status and Justice in Law, Religion, and Society” will be held at Washington and Lee University School of Law, November 1-3, 2019. It will include lots of interest for legal historians. The organizers are Timothy Lubin and Kemilya Atanasova, both of Washington and Lee University. Clifford Ando (University of Chicago) and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Indiana University) will give keynote lectures on citizenship and the legacy of the Antonine constitution and on religious status under secular law, respectively. The list of presenters is here. An excerpt from the conference description: 
This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together historians of religious, ancient, and medieval law systems from around the world with scholars of modern legal systems, on the hypothesis that comparative discussion can throw new light on the role of status-considerations in shaping how individuals experience and use the law, in defining what counts as a fair or just outcome, and in changes to the legal landscape in times of social change.  It may be that the role of statuses (both legal and societal) in premodern and religious legal orders may hold lessons for understanding the role of statuses in the law of republican polities, despite their aspiration to ensure equality of individuals before the law.
Further information is available here.

-posted by Mitra Sharafi