Religious Origins and Modern Legal Norms: A Dialectical Account

A significant amount of scholarship in the field of law and religion involves tracing the sources of contemporary legal and political norms to historical religious traditions. But the relationship between historical religious traditions and modern legal norms is often implicit and undertheorized. This article examines three examples of leading scholars who trace the influence of religious ideas to legal norms in strikingly different ways. Highlighting the work of Martha Nussbaum, Jeremy Waldron, and Samuel Moyn helps bring to rational articulation the normative decisions that are made in attempts to trace historical religious traditions to the contemporary norms that shape modern legal systems.