Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion

The University of Adelaide

Home | Faculties & Divisions | Search

Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion

You are here: The University of Adelaide >

Print View

Further enquiries contact:
RUSSLR

PUBLIC LECTURE

“Islam and Moral Regulation in Indonesia: An End in Sight?”

When: Wednesday, 21 October 2009 at 1.00pm

Where: Moot Court Room, Ligertwood Building, Law School

Speaker: Tim Lindsey is Professor of Asian Law and Director of the Asian Law Centre and Foundation Director of the Centre for Islamic Law and Society in the Melbourne Law School. He is also an ARC Federation Fellow, leading a 5-year research program titled “Islam and Modernity: Syari'ah, Terrorism and Governance in South-East Asia". He is Chair of the Australia Indonesia Institute and a founding editor of the Australian Journal of Asian Law. Tim's recent publications include ‘Indonesia: Law and Society’, ‘Corruption in Asia’ (with Howard Dick), ‘Chinese Indonesians: Remembering, Distorting, Forgetting’ (with Helen Pausacker) and ‘Law Reform in Developing and Transitional States'. He is currently completing a three book series on Islam and laws in Southeast Asia.

Synopsis: Indonesia's democratisation and decentralisation in the wake of Soeharto's resignation in May 1998 ended three decades of state repression of public expressions of Islamic identity. The result was a dramatic reassertion of Islamic politics and 'Syariahisation' as it is known in Indonesia: attempts to legislate norms derived from Islamic traditions, at both local and national levels, including in Aceh. These attempts have typically been socially conservative and highly controversial, and the best known cases relate to pornography, sexuality and moral regulation. They have provoked debate, protests and sometimes violence, and women and minority groups have been targets of legal harassment and violence. So far, however, the government has been careful to avoid intervention in this controversy, even if that means neglecting its legal responsibilities. Professor Lindsey will argue, however, that despite the debate they have provoked, the proponents of legal Islamisation have been largely unsuccessful in achieving their decades-old objectives of enforcing a conservative interpretation of Syari’ah, and the tide may now be turning against them.

“A Tale of Two Statutes: A Comparison of Ontario’s and South Australia’s Pioneering Legislation for the Incorporation of Religious Bodies”

When: Tuesday, 25 August, 2009 at 12 noon

Where: Moot Court Room, Ligertwood Building, Law School

Speaker: Dr Greg Taylor is an Associate Professor at Monash University Law School. Born and educated in South Australia, he has made South Australian legal history one of his specialties. In the second half of 2008, he was a Visiting Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, and his talk will be based on research done there and in Adelaide.

Synopsis: Both South Australia and Ontario passed statutes in the middle third of the nineteenth century providing for religious bodies to attain the status of legally recognised corporations. Despite this similarity of object between the two statutes, the background in each British colony was very different and reflects the different self-image of each colony. Ontario also made very heavy weather of its statute, taking six years to pass it, while South Australia’s passed almost without any dispute at all, and very quickly. This talk will explore those differences and thus show that what appeared natural and unarguable to South Australians and Ontarians in the nineteenth century was not in either case.

Previous Lectures

“The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933: Was it Genocide?”
When: Tuesday, 24 March 2009 at 5.30pm
Where: Lecture Theatre One, Ligertwood Building, Law School
Speaker: Dr Roman Serbyn is Professor Emeritus of History, Université du Québec à Montréal (Montreal, Canada).  Professor Serbyn received a PhD degree in History from McGill University in 1975 and taught  Russian and East European history at Université du Québec à Montréal from 1969-2002.
Synopsis: The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 is no longer denied; indeed, the Soviet Communist regime’s responsibility for it is now generally recognized.  What is still debated among scholars and politicians, however, is whether it qualifies as genocide according to the definition of that crime contained in the UN Convention on Genocide and the analysis of the Ukrainian Famine offered by Raphael Lemkin, the legal expert who coined and conceptualized the term “genocide’.  In this lecture, Professor Serbyn argues that the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians was part of Stalin’s regime’s intent to destroy the Ukrainian nation, as such, by physically eliminating its national elites, exterminating a major part of its population, and transforming the rest of the Ukrainian population into obedient cogs of his totalitarian machine.  The criminal intent and the national identity of the targeted group are borne out by the newly revealed Soviet documents housed in Russian and Ukrainian archives.
“Using Human Rights Legislation to Control Hate Speech”

When: Monday, 18 May 2009 at 1.00pm

Where: Moot Court Room, Ligertwood Building, Law School

Speaker: Bruce Elman, BSc (McGill), LLB (Dal), LLM (Harvard) is Dean of Law at the University of Windsor (Canada). Previously, Dean Elman was Belzberg Professor of Constitutional Law and Chair of the Centre for Constitutional Studies at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta. Dean Elman has been Visiting Professor of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1988-1989 and 1995-1996) and Visiting Professor at Niigata University in Japan (1994). Dean Elman has published numerous works on various topics including criminal law, the law of evidence, constitutional reform, The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, hate speech, multiculturalism, and human rights.

Synopsis: In 1970, Canada criminalized hate speech in amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada. Yet, in the past 39 years, very few prosecutions have been brought under these provisions. The federal government and the provinces of Canada have, alternatively, attempted to deal with hate speech through provisions in the Canadian Human Rights Act and its provincial counterparts. Over the past few years, this strategy has been called into question as a result of a number of high profile cases as well as an Advisory report to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. This lecture traces the history of Canadian attempts to combat hate speech through both the criminal law and the various human rights regimes. He will analyze the results of those attempts and comment on the appropriateness of using human rights legislation to control racist speech.

“Protecting Religious Freedom: Two Counterintuitive Dialectics in U.S. Free Exercise Jurisprudence” and "A Comparative Framework for Conceptualizing Church-State Relationships"
When: Monday, 17 August 2009 at 1.15pm
Where: Moot Court Room, Ligertwood Building, Law School
Speakers
W. Cole Durham, Jr. is Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University and Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies. He is a member of the OSCE/ODIHR’s Advisory Council on Freedom of Religion or Belief; is a Vice President of the International Academy for Freedom of Religion and Belief, serves as an advisory member of Church-State centers at DePaul and Baylor Universities; and has testified before the United States Congress on religious intolerance in Europe and on the Religious Liberty Protection Act.  He has written (with Noel Reynolds) Religious Liberty in Western Thought, and (with Silvio Ferrari) Law and Religion in Post-Communist Europe. He is also the author of numerous law review articles dealing with religious liberty and other comparative law themes.
Brett G. Scharffs is Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University and Associate Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies. His teaching and scholarly interests include law and religion, philosophy of law, and international business law. Professor Scharffs is widely published in these areas, and is currently finishing two books, Law and the Limits of Logic, and Law and Religion: U.S., International, and Comparative Perspectives (co-written with Professor Durham).
The Honourable Judge J. Clifford Wallace, Senior Circuit Judge and Emeritus Chief Judge, United States Court Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, will offer a brief response to the presentations of Professors Durham and Scharffs.
Synopses
"Protecting Religious Freedom: Two Counterintuitive Dialectics in U.S. Free Exercise Jurisprudence": Professor Scharffs will address two important dialectics regarding freedom of religion in the United States. The first is the dialectic between freedom and equality in interpreting the meaning of free exercise. The second is the dialectic between courts and legislatures in the protection of religious freedom. The paper will query what, if any, light this may shed on the current debate in Australia about the merits of an Australian Bill (or Charter) of Rights.
"A Comparative Framework for Conceptualizing Church-State Relationships": Professor Durham will discuss an innovative schematic for conceptualizing the relationship between the degree of religious freedom in a society and the degree of identification between religion and the state. Contrary to our initial expectations there is not a simple correlation between non-identification and religious freedom, and a high degree of identification and an absence of religious freedom. The paper concludes with the introduction and defence of a new conceptual framework for thinking about these relationships.