Most U.S. states implement jutice through English common law. Some states include some elements of Spanish civil law. Louisiana is governed by civil law, or “Code Napoleon.”
Could an American state adopt Islamic Sharia law?
The adoption of a legal code specifically based on the teachings of a particular religion would presumably run afoul of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. The death penalty for apostasy from Islam violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. Amputation as a penalty for theft and death by stoning for adultery would likely violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Differences in the weight given to the testimony of men and women, and I believe also of Muslims and non-Muslims, would seem to violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
According to the Britannica the death penalty for apostasy, amputation for theft, and death by stoning for adultery are all fixed crimes and penalties (hadd) in traditional shari’ah law; however I believe there are less strict “shari’ah-light” systems which include some features of traditional Islamic law, especially in personal status matters like marriage and divorce, alongside concepts from other legal systems, which are in use in many Middle Eastern countries outside of places like Saudi Arabia. The implementation of any legal system which was explicitly “Islamic”, even if it avoided the more problematic aspects of full traditional shari’ah, would likely still run into separation of church and state problems in the U.S.
The main two constitutional impediments would be separation of church and state (1st amendment) and the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment (ith amendment). On the latter point, the Supreme Court ruled several years ago that not even rape could be punished by execution. So, at a minimum, the draconion aspects of Sharia would be curtailed.
But, to answer a slightly different question - Can American laws be enacted which correspond to and derive from the religfious convictions of the citizenry? - the answer is yes. Of which the almost universal prohibition of euthanasia is, to me, the most glaring contemporarily relevant example. An older example is when the Supremes ruled (in the 50s, I think) that states could have Sunday-closing laws.
A law is not invalid because it corresponds to the religious convictions of some or most people; for example, laws against murder are not unconstitutional because the Bible forbids murder as one of the Ten Commandments. However, the courts have ruled that a law must have a secular purpose, so a law with a purely religious basis will likely be thrown out.
(And to expand on the above regarding Sunday-closing laws: The “weekend” is now a sufficiently well-established part of American life that laws giving it special status could now plausibly be argued to have a secular purpose.)
Funny though - isn’t it? - that it was only after weekends became widely secularized that Sunday-closing laws went by the boards.
IMHO, the Supremes simply chickened out on that one.
Why? They decided there was nothing inherent in the law dealing with constitutional violations. You want to whine about SOCUS, go become one. Then you can criticise them.
Whatever. :rolleyes: