The capacity of the secular state for religious law -A qualitative empirical research of the integration of religious based legal proceedings in a democratic state with reference to the USA and Canada

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Religious legal systems are already part of research in legal departments. There is a need to deal with religious law in cases where religious communities want to apply their religious law within the secular state. Orthodox jews and muslims understand religious law as a constituent for their belief. They might look for courts where religious cases can be tried. Therefore, it has to be proved whether religious law fits into the realm of constitutional law and how religious courts could operate within the limitations of a democratic state. In Germany there is no regulation but there is a slight rise of attention in the legal academy for it, especially with regard to muslim minorities.The main goal of this research is a qualitative empirical inquiry of religious courts in secular states on the dogmatic and the practical level in order to show how religious law can be incorporated in a secular legal system. The inquiry is a prerequisite for the second step in which I will examine how German law could incorporate religious law. For the project I chose a sociological approach by looking at a rabbinical court in the U.S. and a sharia court in Canada. I want to examine the procedural aspects and the constitutional integration in order to see if there are conflicts with the secular state and if such an integration works for both sides the secular state and the religious community. A rabbinical court in the U.S. turns out to be a good research object because the practice of rabbinical courts is well established and accepted in the U.S. For islamic law I will examine the situation of muslim communities in the US and Canada. Especially, the Canada case is interesting because there is an energetic political debate which led to a change of the court status in 2005. The empirical study should serve as a reference for dealing with religious law in the context of German law.