Nope, he can marry anybody but a Catholic, and still keep his place in the line of succession.
However, he himself must remain a Protestant to keep his place in the line of succession.
A legal system based on or incorporating elements of Shariah doesn’t necessarily include any of these things, and in practice most don’t.
(Just like you can have a common-law based system without the liberal recourse to the death penalty which characterises certain American jurisdictions.)
Okay IANAL but here’s my understanding. In the United States, the foundation of the law is the people. The law is given validity because the people chose representatives who enacted the law. So a law is valid because it has popular support.
Some countries have a common law system, which theoretically rely on tradition. It can be argued that a law is valid because it’s been recognized as valid for a long time. The law is essentially recognized as the codification of the way people have been doing things.
And some countries have religious law. The foundation of the law is based on divine authority. A law is valid if it agrees with the tenets of the religion.
Sharia law is obviously the third variety. It says that all laws must be derived from Islam. It’s not considered sufficient to say that everyone thinks it’s a good idea to legalize marijuana or prohibit gay marriage. You’re supposed to study the Quran and determine what Allah wants and enact that.
Most countries have a mixture of these legal systems. Most Islamic countries for example, have systems for enacting civil laws based on the public will with the proviso that these laws don’t directly contravene Islam.
And obviously, there’s a huge overlap between these different systems. What the people want is going to be connected to what they’ve traditionally done in the past and what their religious beliefs are. The overwhelming majority of the members of the United States Congress have been Christians. Does that mean they’re enacting Christian law? Not officially but obviously their Christian beliefs are going to be reflected in the laws they enact.
If your understanding is that American law is not like the second or third systems you describe, you’re a million miles off. We have, on paper, a combination of the first and second systems, but we still have plenty of the third variety sprinkled in.
Really? Could you tell me what religious authorities review acts of Congress and veto those which conflict with scripture?
Part of Congress thinks it is a religious authority.
Your earlier post didn’t say anything about “religious authorities” doing this. If anyone involved in the legislatative process seeks to establish what a religious tradition dictates and then enshrine it in law, does that not meet the requirement you described?
That is why, as you concede yourself, there is huge overlap between the three approaches you outlined. In the US the foundation of the law is the will of the people, but the people are profoundly influenced by their own customs, values and traditions, including - often quite explicitly - religious beliefs and practices. Is it a coincidence that the majority of Americans are Christians and come from Christian backgrounds and traditions, and that American marriages laws invariably mandate monogamy and mostly forbid same-sex marriage?
This needs a slight correction. Common law is not a system of legitimacy; it is a system of jurisprudence. That is, common law tells you how to interpret laws with the aim of consistency and predictability; it does not tell you what gives the laws authority. Specifically, “common law” means using past interpretations of law as a guide to how to interpret present and future laws. The United States is a common law country. In terms of legitimizing laws, most common law countries rely on popular sovereignty — if anything, the US represents the forefront of abandoning popular sovereignty in favour of higher moral goods, i.e. rights and freedoms. At the time, the UK’s Parliament had no such limitation on its powers.
Religious law is really just a particular subset of law-through-appeal-to-higher-moral-goods. And, as you yourself noted, the boundary between those two ideas is pretty wavy — human rights, including a right to political participation, can easily be expressed in religious terms.
:Smack: I should have said “system of legal interpretation”, not “jurisprudence”. Eek, some days I’m stupid…
There’s a difference between secular law enacted by Christians and Christian law.
This is what a religiously derived law would look like:
Now show me a law enacted in the United States that cites scriptural authority like this. But in a religious legal system, a religious authority like that would be required. The idea is that men alone do not have the authority to enact laws. God enacts the laws and men just codify it.
I’m getting even further beyond my realm of legal knowledge here. But my understanding is that American judges are supposed to base any decision they issue on statute. Even if they wander quite a ways off from it, they’re supposed to theoretically be able to point to a written law and claim “See? It says so right here.”
But I will concede that there are a growing number of decisions being issued where this principle has been ignored. Some judges now cite natural law to defend their decisions. Which I disagree with. If a judge can’t find a written law that backs up what he’s saying, he shouldn’t be saying it. I feel an appeal to natural law is little different than “this is what I think the law should say”.
Couple of thoughts here:
You’re putting an awful lot of emphasis on the precise wording of the legislative statement. If the text of the law omitted the last statement that you suggest, but in fact the legislators enacted the law because they felt constrained by Ex 20:15 to do so, would that make any difference in substance? I don’t think it would. And if they felt so constrained, not by Ex 20:15 in particular, but by some more general religious feeling or tradition, would that make any difference?
Secondly, if a law must explicitly cite a religiously-based claim to authority in order to be a “religiously-derived law”, then most laws in most sharia-law countries are not “religiously-derived law” and, if follows, the adoption of a sharia system would not necessarily entail the adoption of “religiously-derived law” as you define it.
Thirdly, the US Declaration of Independence, by contrast, is a religiously-derived law as you define it, since it explicitly claims to be an exercise of rights with which, it asserts, all men have been endowed by their Creator. That is to say, the Colonists claim the right to overthrow royal government and establish their own because the Creator has given them that authority.
And this is an important point, since it shows that there is no necessary conflict between a religious claim to legal authority, and the assertion of popular sovereignty - the first and the third of the categories of legal systems that you outlined above. It’s entirely possible to frame in religious terms a claim that the people have a right to determine their own government, and there is a long (though of course not uncontested) tradition in both Christianity and Islam of doing precisely that. (Vox populi, vox Dei, and all that.)
The truth is that all legal systems are going to reflect some set of values, beliefs and principles, and these values, etc, will emerge from the culture that creates the laws. To the extent that the culture is influenced or shaped by religion, then the values, etc shape the laws are likely to include religious values. The mechanisms by which this happens may be more or less explicit, and more or less formal, but they will usually be effective and often be transparent. Asserting popular sovereignty or democratic accountability is clearly not going to counter this; if anything it will reinforce it.
Hey, it worked for the Romans…
I am comfortable with religious law only under two conditions.
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That law does not claim, or attempt to exert, any authority over individuals who do not self identify as belonging to that religion. Including individuals who have previously done so, but have now renounced their faith.
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There is no widespread pressuring of people to identify as belonging to that religion.
I don’t believe Sharia law passes the first test, and I don’t think any religious law passes the second at this time.
enigmatic, when you say “religious law”, do you mean “the legal system of a religion” or “a country’s legal system based on religion”? Because I’m reasonably sure that Canon Law is the first type and it doesn’t pressure people to identify as Catholic.
Ideally any law that draws it’s justification solely on religious grounds. I think a certain amount of pragmatism is going to be required when considering legal systems that have obviously developed over a long period of time. For the specific example given, I’m willing to except that changing the laws regarding who is eligible to become the king or queen has a whole host of pretty obvious technical and constitutional issues, but I would expect it to be changed regardless if there was ever a suggestion that it would actually become an issue.
I’m not sure this is a particularly great example though. The UK is a pretty secular society, many of these types of law have been changed, and this Particular law is uniquely difficult to address. Are you seriously going to argue that Sharia law isn’t substantially based on religious doctrine?
I really do have no problem at all with somebody freely making the decision to be subject to such a legal system. If you can honestly convince me that a significant majority of Muslims, in a specific area, would be free to declare themselves an atheist, a Jew, or any other variety of religious adherent, and that they therefore reject sharia law, without fear of prejudice or repercussion, then I have zero problem with them being subject to sharia. Otherwise yes I do, because they are compelled to do so, even if that compulsion is not obvious.
I am happy to tolerate any flavour of religious belief, exactly up to the point that it impinges on the freedom of others to do the same.