University of Toronto Law School Faculty Blog

Prof. Ed Morgan: "An insidious cultural campaign"

This commentary by Prof. Ed Morgan was first published in the National Post on July 2, 2009.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are being exhibited this week at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), have survived time, weather, sand--and now the political storm caused by protests at their being toured by the Israel Museum, which houses the scrolls in Jerusalem.

Opponents of the exhibit include the Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Canadian solidarity groups supporting the Palestinian cause. They accuse the Israel Museum of having taken the scrolls from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities upon Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967. Israel's actions are alleged to be contrary to international conventions protecting cultural artifacts and prohibiting their removal.

The ROM is right to stare down the protests.

Prof. Mohammad Fadel on Family Pluralism

I have recently posted a draft of a chapter to be published in a forthcoming work on family law pluralism (MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN A MULTICULTURAL CONTEXT: RECONSIDERING THE BOUNDARIES OF CIVIL LAW AND RELIGION, Joel A. Nichols, ed., Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming 2010) to my ssrn page (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421978).  Against the background of the controversy engendered by the proposal in Ontario by some Muslims to use the Ontario Arbitration Act to resolve family law disputes among Muslims using binding arbitration, I have attempted to lay out an argument as to why a liberal system of family law - at least one that is committed to a version of political liberalism - is required to recognize at least a limited amount of autonomy within the family, and to that extent, it cannot have a categorical objection to the recognition of binding family law arbitrations, at least to the extent that it would otherwise recognize and enforce private agreements within the family (whether pre-nuptial agreements or separation agreements) of the parties to the arbitration.