How closely connected should church and state be? May a state endorse the role and meaning of religion at all? Can it treat distinct religious groups differently? This book addresses these questions and more through a portrayal and comparison of the legal systems of Germany, Israel, France, and the United States. This thought-provoking book brings the often opposing demands of religious and secular freedoms into clear focus.

The achievements of the democratic constitutional order have long been associated with the sovereign nation-state. Civic nationalist assumptions hold that social solidarity and social plurality are compatible, offering a path to guarantees of individual rights, social justice, and tolerance for minority voices. Yet today, challenges to the liberal-democratic sovereign nation-state are proliferating on all levels, from multinational corporations and international institutions to populist nationalisms and revanchist ethnic and religious movements. Many critics see the nation-state itself as a tool of racial and economic exclusion and repression. What other options are available for managing pluralism, fostering self-government, furthering social justice, and defending equality? In this interdisciplinary volume, a group of prominent international scholars considers alternative political formations to the nation-state and their ability to preserve and expand the achievements of democratic constitutionalism in the twenty-first century. The book considers four different principles of organization-federation, subsidiarity, status group legal pluralism, and transnational corporate autonomy-contrasts them with the unitary and centralized nation-state, and inquires into their capacity to deal with deep societal differences. In essays that examine empire, indigenous struggles, corporate institutions, forms of federalism, and the complexities of political secularism, anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists remind us that the sovereign nation-state is not inevitable and that multinational and federal states need not privilege a particular group. Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism helps us answer the crucial question of whether any of the alternatives might be better suited to core democratic principles.

How closely connected should church and state be? May a state endorse the role and meaning of religion at all? Can it treat distinct religious groups differently? This book addresses these questions and more through a portrayal and comparison of the legal systems of Germany, Israel, France, and the United States. This thought-provoking book brings the often opposing demands of religious and secular freedoms into clear focus.

The religion and state debate in Israel has overlooked the Palestinian-Arab religious communities and their members, focusing almost exclusively on Jewish religious institutions and norms and Jewish majority members. Because religion and state debates in many other countries are defined largely by minority religions' issues, the debate in Israel is anomalous. Michael Karayanni advances a legal matrix that explains this anomaly by referencing specific constitutional values. At the same time, he also takes a critical look at these values and presents the argument that what might be seen as liberal and multicultural is at its core just as illiberal and coercive. In making this argument, A Multicultural Entrapment suggests a set of multicultural qualifications by which one should judge whether a group based accommodation is of a multicultural nature.

The religion and state debate in Israel has overlooked the Palestinian-Arab religious communities and their members, focusing almost exclusively on Jewish religious institutions and norms and Jewish majority members. Because religion and state debates in many other countries are defined largely by minority religions' issues, the debate in Israel is anomalous. Michael Karayanni advances a legal matrix that explains this anomaly by referencing specific constitutional values. At the same time, he also takes a critical look at these values and presents the argument that what might be seen as liberal and multicultural is at its core just as illiberal and coercive. In making this argument, A Multicultural Entrapment suggests a set of multicultural qualifications by which one should judge whether a group based accommodation is of a multicultural nature.

Conflicts in a Conflict outlines and analyzes the legal doctrines instructing the Israeli courts in private and civil disputes involving the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, since 1967 until the present day. In doing so, author, Michael Karayanni sheds light on a whole sphere of legal designs and norms that have not received any thorough scholarly attention, as most of the writings thus far have been on issues pertaining to international law, human rights, history, and politics. For the most part, Israeli courts turned to conflict of laws, or private international law to address private disputes implicating the Palestinian Territories. After making a thorough investigation into the jurisdictional designs of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, both before and after the Oslo Peace Accords, Conflicts in a Conflict comes to focus on traditional topics such as adjudicative jurisdiction, choice of law, and recognitions and enforcement of judgments. Related issues such as the foreign sovereign immunity claim of the Palestinian Authority before Israeli courts as well as the extent to which Palestinian plaintiffs were granted access to justice rights, are also outlined and analyzed.
This book's compelling thesis is the existence of a close relationship between conflict of laws doctrines as they developed over the years and Israeli policies generally in respect of the Palestinian Territories. This study of the conflict of laws in a war setting and conflict of laws in a jurisdictionally ambiguous location, will greatly serve scholars and practitioners in similarly troubled and complex legal situations elsewhere.

The achievements of the democratic constitutional order have long been associated with the sovereign nation-state. Civic nationalist assumptions hold that social solidarity and social plurality are compatible, offering a path to guarantees of individual rights, social justice, and tolerance for minority voices. Yet today, challenges to the liberal-democratic sovereign nation-state are proliferating on all levels, from multinational corporations and international institutions to populist nationalisms and revanchist ethnic and religious movements. Many critics see the nation-state itself as a tool of racial and economic exclusion and repression. What other options are available for managing pluralism, fostering self-government, furthering social justice, and defending equality? In this interdisciplinary volume, a group of prominent international scholars considers alternative political formations to the nation-state and their ability to preserve and expand the achievements of democratic constitutionalism in the twenty-first century. The book considers four different principles of organization-federation, subsidiarity, status group legal pluralism, and transnational corporate autonomy-contrasts them with the unitary and centralized nation-state, and inquires into their capacity to deal with deep societal differences. In essays that examine empire, indigenous struggles, corporate institutions, forms of federalism, and the complexities of political secularism, anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists remind us that the sovereign nation-state is not inevitable and that multinational and federal states need not privilege a particular group. Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism helps us answer the crucial question of whether any of the alternatives might be better suited to core democratic principles.