(no subject)

[fpb]

After his astonishingly stupid remarks, a campaign has been started by The Sun newspaper (owner: Rupert Murdoch) to have the Archbishop of Canterbury sacked. (I am not even sure he can be sacked, but his position can certainly be made untenable.) Since he was essentially elected by heavy public pressure from The Times newspaper (owner: Rupert Murdoch), there is a sorry kind of irony here.

Comments

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Sure, some orthodox Muslims might not be satisfied, but if you check the Volokh piece, he cites examples of Muslims in the States taking advantage of religious arbitration or specifying the law of Muslim countries under choice of law provisions. Evidently there is a demand for such things.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This is not about what some random people may have done or been allowed to do. (You are assuming, at any rate, that whoever accepted their decisions was correct. In fact, there cannot be two sources of legitimacy in US law any more than in any other - something which the guns of Abraham Lincoln proved with exemplary legal logic.) It is about what the head of Britain's state church suggests should be done with British legal practice. And it shows a lack of understanding of the matters he discusses which is troublesome to say the least.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Actually, binding arbitration is really common in the US (and Canada, from what I hear). It's not unusual in Hassidic communities in New York for people to sign contracts that stipulate that conflicts be adjudicated by, say, the Bet Din of the Orthodox Union. And not just in religious contexts: contracts can specify venue in the US, but include a choice of law clause stipulating that the contract is to be adjudicated under (for example) French law. A whole segment of bad television (Judge Judy and her ilk) is based around the concept of binding arbitration. The American legal system allows great freedom when it comes to civil contracts, which are enforced by the "real" courts. Obviously, criminal law is a different matter—you can't get the criminal courts to specify beheading as a punishment. And this is still a far cry from having religion-specific civil codes, as India does.

It seems to me that this liberalization of civil law and arbitration is what Williams was talking about, since the examples he mentions are "aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution." There's plenty of room for disagreement here (how "voluntary" are many of these contracts?) but let's be certain what we're disagreeing with.

I think English law is less liberal when it comes to this. (Cardinal Wolsey, after all, was charged with primunary among other things.) But before the expulsion of the Jews the English legal system did enforce the judgments of Jewish courts in their areas of competence.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No. He was speaking, in the first instance, of social cohesion. He suggested that social cohesion might be advanced if we conceded some space to Sharia. Which, for the reasons I have already set out, is wrong. We are not talking about arbitration. We are talking about who makes the laws. I really do not see why you keep bringing in these red herrings. Surely you are aware that, across the world, the introduction or otherwise of Sharia is a most bloody political issue? Do you imagine that people are dying in West Africa, that people are fighting in Pakistan, that people turn out in the streets in their hundreds of thousands in Turkey, because they have strong opinions about ARBITRATION? Sharia is a cuckoo in the legal nest. It cannot, at the present state of things, coexist with any other legal system. And since you quote Canada, go see what happened, even in that ultra-liberal country, when someone in Ontario had the same bright idea as Dr.Williams.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I suggest you read Melanie Phillips' analysis of what he has actually written, and why his retraction is plainly mendacious (something one would not want from a Church leader). If you read the comments too, you may come to understand why his statements have roused enormous rage. There was no need for "the tabloids" to distort anything. http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/495671/dhimmi-or-just-dim.thtml#comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Indeed I have. I know all about Tariq Ramadan, alas - including some things that are not commonly known outside Italy, such as his clash with the great Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who is under a virtual sentence of death from the Muslim Brotherhood.