CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP
presents
Professor Suzanne Stone
Cardozo School of Law
The Interaction of Religion and Human Rights Discourses:
Babel or Translation, Conflict or Convergence?
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium, Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
This paper was solicited by the Israel Democracy Institute for a collection of essays on “The Role of Religion in Human Rights Discourse.” The editors’ requested that contributors reflect on “the appropriate discursive framework for a dialogue between a religious tradition (in this case, Judaism) and the human rights tradition.” In this paper, I caution against several recent attempts at rapprochement between religion and human rights; specifically, attempts to anchor human rights in a particular religion or to advance a common language of sanctity or inviolability. I then argue that a more useful strategy of convergence between religion and human rights is to emphasize human rights as a purely secular political project that revolves around consensus and convention. I then explore the internal stance of Jewish traditional sources toward incorporation of norms originating elsewhere merely in virtue of their acceptance by the family of nations.
Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Yeshiva University, Professor of Law, Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Cardozo Law School, and Academic Counsel of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. Stone has held the Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at both the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, and also has visited at Princeton, Columbia Law, Hebrew University Law, and Tel Aviv Law. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University Law School and was a Danforth Fellow in 1974 in Jewish History and Classical Religions at Yale University. Before joining the Cardozo faculty, Stone clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. In addition to teaching courses in Jewish Law and Political Thought and Jewish Law and American Legal Theory, she currently teaches Federal Courts and Law, Religion and the State. Stone is the co-editor-in-chief of Diné Israel, a Journal of Jewish Law co-edited with Tel Aviv Law School, and on the editorial board of the Jewish Quarterly Review. She is a member of the board of the Human Rights project of the Israel Democracy Institute, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, and the Center for Ethics of Yeshiva University. Professor Stone writes and lectures on the intersection of Jewish law and legal theory. Her publications include: "In Pursuit of the Counter-text: The Turn to the Jewish Legal Model in Contemporary American Legal Theory," (Harvard Law Review); "The Jewish Conception of Civil Society," in Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton University Press); "Feminism and the Rabbinic Conception of Justice" in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University); and “Rabbinic Legal Magic,” (Yale Journal of Law & Humanities). Her work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic. In Fall 2010, she delivered the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures at Yale University.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
