Sharia Tribunals, Rabbinical Courts, and Christian Panels

Abstract

This book explores the rise of private arbitration in religious and other values-oriented communities, and it argues that secular societies should use secular legal frameworks to facilitate, enforce, and regulate religious arbitration, including those from Rabbinical Courts, Sharia Tribunals, and any faith-based arbitration tribunals. It covers the history of religious arbitration, the kinds of faith-based dispute resolution models currently in use, how the law should perceive them, and what the role of religious arbitration in the United States should be. Part I examines why religious individuals and communities are increasingly turning to private faith-based dispute resolution to arbitrate their disputes. It focuses on why religious communities feel disenfranchised from secular law, and particularly secular family law. Part II looks at why American law is so comfortable with faith-based arbitration, given its penchant for enabling parties to order their relationships and resolve their disputes using norms and values that are often different from and sometimes opposed to secular standards under the Federal Arbitration Act. Part III weighs the proper procedural, jurisdictional, and contractual limits of arbitration generally, and of religious arbitration particularly. It identifies and explains the reasonable limitations on religious arbitration, particularly in family law matters such as divorce. Part IV examines whether secular societies should facilitate effective, legally enforceable religious dispute resolution, and it argues that religious arbitration is not only good for the religious community itself, but that having many different avenues for faith-based arbitration that are properly limited is good for any pluralistic democracy inhabited by diverse faith groups.