Archive | Islamic Law in the American Legal System

A commenter responded to my Why American Courts Should Sometimes Consider Islamic Court Rulings post with this: This shows a complete lack of understanding of how badly women are treated under Islamic law. We give effect to English or French or even Taiwanese domestic decrees because we can have some confidence that whatever the substantive […]

On the Why American Courts Should Sometimes Consider Islamic Court Rulings thread, a commenter writes: I think one consideration should be if the foreign court would honor a American court’s findings. This shouldn’t be a one-way street. I suspect that most foreign countries are perfectly happy taking at face value American marriages and divorces between […]

There is one twist on the foreign coerced marriages question that I wanted to deal with separately. As I mentioned earlier, marriage provides the poorer partner (in the scenario my correspondent was describing, usually a young woman) with important rights. Refusing to recognize Islamic law marriages on the ground that some of them might be […]

A commenter on the Why American Courts Should Sometimes Consider Islamic Court Rulings thread writes, The scenario we commenters have discussed here more than once is the possibility that an arranged and nonconsensual, or at least coerced, marriage takes place in another country, and then the couple moves here. We’ve disagreed as to whether that […]

Tuesday, I blogged about a Massachusetts court’s decision not to honor a Lebanese Islamic court’s child custody order; I thought the Massachusetts decision was a sound application of religion-neutral Massachusetts law, under which foreign child custody orders dealing with Massachusetts resident children are honored only when they are entered based on standards that are close […]