Law Links - September 2016

Conference opens the door to a rich vein of scholarship

Buddhism.

A major two-day conference at the University at Buffalo School of Law is being seen as a milestone in the scholarly study of the intersection between religion and the law.

The conference, “Buddhist Law and State Law in Comparative Perspective,” will be held Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 at the Law School’s home in John Lord O’Brian Hall, on UB’s North Campus. Sponsored by the school’s Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, the conference is being organized by UB Law’s Professor Rebecca R. French and Benjamin Schonthal, a lecturer in Buddhism and Asian religions at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

French says the conference is one of the first to pull together scholars who study the influence of the Buddhist vinaya, the religious tradition’s canonical legal texts, on laws and governments throughout Asia. Though libraries are filled with books examining the influence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam on law, she says, almost no scholarship exists on Buddhist influences.

“Most of this has not been thought about, discovered or written about,” French says. “We’re literally doing the very beginning of it.”

The conference also will serve as the official launch of a new peer-reviewed journal edited by French, Buddhism, Law & Society. The journal is published by William S. Hein & Co., the world’s largest distributor of law and law-related periodicals and materials to more than 3,200 locations.

Among the topics to be raised at the conference, French says, are:

  • The importance of different versions of the original Buddhist law codes in Sanskrit, Pali and vernacular sources.
  • The key principles of continuity and discontinuity in the practice of Buddhist law in ancient and modern times.
  • Differences in the conceptions and practices of “legality” in monastic and state legal structures.

In addition to French, the two dozen presenters will include SUNY Distinguished Service Professor David Engel, a law professor and leader in the Law & Society scholarly movement who has special interest in Thailand. The conference builds on the collection of essays Buddhism and Law: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014), edited by French and Dr. Mark Nathan, a UB assistant professor of history.