The International Center for Law and Religion Studies and Aspen Publishers / Wolters Kluwer Law & Business are pleased to announce the release of the casebook Law and Religion: National, International, and Comparative Perspectives, co-authored by ICLRS Director W. Cole Durham, Jr. and Associate Director Brett G. Scharffs, with contributions from many others at the Center, especially Coordinating Editor Suzanne Sitthichai Disparte. Developed for use in English-speaking law-school courses, the work is dynamic combination of international and domestic materials, designed to stimulate discussion of familiar and sensitive issues of conflict and debate in a global context. This unique work offers a new paradigm for studying law and religion in response to the forces of globalization and an increased international focus on religion. Combined with the groundbreaking work of the European Court of Human Rights and the work on religious freedom issues being done by other courts worldwide, these factors produce conditions that throw a new light upon many of the distinctive features of the U.S. legal system.
To deal with such an extensive and dynamic subject matter, the authors and editors of the Casebook have produced a Web Supplement containing resources impossible to include in the single volume, as well as teaching modules and "country threads" giving national, cultural, and language-specific perspectives. The Web Supplement has been released for Fall 2010 in preliminary form. It is an ongoing work.