Two Concepts of Religious Freedom in the European Court of Human Rights

This paper considers the way in which recent historical work on the history of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience opens up a new interpretation of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in the headscarf cases. These decisions have been widely criticized as adopting a militantly secularist approach to the presence of Islamic religious symbols in the public sphere, an approach that seems inconsistent or even overtly discriminatory in light of the court’s recent decision in Lautsi that the compulsory display of crucifixes in the classroom did not breach Italy’s convention obligations. I argue that the headscarf cases turn less on the balance between state neutrality and religious belief, than on an understanding of certain religious symbols as a threat to public order and as harbingers of sectarian strife which undermine democracy

What should freedom of religion become?

This interdisciplinary volume examines the relationship between secularism, freedom of religion and human rights in legal, theoretical, historical and political perspective. It brings together chapters from leading scholars of human rights, law and religion, political theory, religious studies and history, and provides insights into the state of the debate about the relationship between these concepts. Comparative in orientation, its chapters draw on constitutional and political discourses and experience not only from Western Europe and the United States, but also from India, the Arab world, and Malaysia.1: What Should Freedom of Religion Become?, Nehal Bhuta 2: Reimagining Secularism: Respect, Domination and Principled Distance, Rajeev Bhargava 3: Citizenship, Religious Rights, and State Identity in Arab Constitutions: Who is Free and What Are They Free to Do?, Nathan J. Brown 4: Communal Religious Rights or Majoritarian Oppression: Conversion and Proselytism Laws in Malaysia and India, Carolyn Evans and Timnah Rachel Baker 5: Too Much Secularism? Religious Freedom in European History and the European Court of Human Rights, Samuel Moyn 6: US Exceptionalism in the Regulation of Religion, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan 7: Rethinking Secularism in Europe, Lorenzo Zucc

Do Language Models Learn about Legal Entity Types during Pretraining?

Language Models (LMs) have proven their ability to acquire diverse linguistic knowledge during the pretraining phase, potentially serving as a valuable source of incidental supervision for downstream tasks. However, there has been limited research conducted on the retrieval of domain-specific knowledge, and specifically legal knowledge. We propose to explore the task of Entity Typing, serving as a proxy for evaluating legal knowledge as an essential aspect of text comprehension, and a foundational task to numerous downstream legal NLP applications. Through systematic evaluation and analysis and two types of prompting (cloze sentences and QA-based templates) and to clarify the nature of these acquired cues, we compare diverse types and lengths of entities both general and domain-specific entities, semantics or syntax signals, and different LM pretraining corpus (generic and legal-oriented) and architectures (encoder BERT-based and decoder-only with Llama2). We show that (1) Llama2 performs well on certain entities and exhibits potential for substantial improvement with optimized prompt templates, (2) law-oriented LMs show inconsistent performance, possibly due to variations in their training corpus, (3) LMs demonstrate the ability to type entities even in the case of multi-token entities, (4) all models struggle with entities belonging to sub-domains of the law (5) Llama2 appears to frequently overlook syntactic cues, a shortcoming less present in BERT-based architectures. The code of the experiments is available at https://github.com/clairebarale/ probing_legal_entity_types

Automated Refugee Case Analysis: An NLP Pipeline for Supporting Legal Practitioners

In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end pipeline for retrieving, processing, and extracting targeted information from legal cases. We investigate an under-studied legal domain with a case study on refugee law in Canada. Searching case law for past similar cases is a key part of legal work for both lawyers and judges, the potential end-users of our prototype. While traditional named-entity recognition labels such as dates provide meaningful information in legal work, we propose to extend existing models and retrieve a total of 19 useful categories of items from refugee cases. After creating a novel data set of cases, we perform information extraction based on state-of-the-art neural named-entity recognition (NER). We test different architectures including two transformer models, using contextual and non-contextual embeddings, and compare general purpose versus domain-specific pre-training. The results demonstrate that models pre-trained on legal data perform best despite their smaller size, suggesting that domain matching had a larger effect than network architecture. We achieve a F1 score above 90% on five of the targeted categories and over 80% on four further categories.Comment: 9 pages, preprint of long paper accepted to Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 202

AsyLex: A Dataset for Legal Language Processing of Refugee Claims

Advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and language models have demonstrated immense potential in the legal domain, enabling automated analysis and comprehension of legal texts. However, developing robust models in Legal NLP is significantly challenged by the scarcity of resources. This paper presents AsyLex, the first dataset specifically designed for Refugee Law applications to address this gap. The dataset introduces 59,112 documents on refugee status determination in Canada from 1996 to 2022, providing researchers and practitioners with essential material for training and evaluating NLP models for legal research and case review. Case review is defined as entity extraction and outcome prediction tasks. The dataset includes 19,115 gold-standard human-labeled annotations for 20 legally relevant entity types curated with the help of legal experts and 1,682 gold-standard labeled documents for the case outcome. Furthermore, we supply the corresponding trained entity extraction models and the resulting labeled entities generated through the inference process on AsyLex. Four supplementary features are obtained through rule-based extraction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset on the legal judgment prediction task to predict the binary outcome and test a set of baselines using the text of the documents and our annotations. We observe that models pretrained on similar legal documents reach better scores, suggesting that acquiring more datasets for specialized domains such as law is crucial. The dataset is available at https://huggingface. co/datasets/clairebarale/AsyLex

Measuring Stateness, Ranking Political Orders: Indexes of state fragility and state failure

This paper examines two indexes of state failure and state fragility. It considers the wider historical context for the emergence of interest in state failure and state fragility, and examines attempts to define the concepts. After reflecting on the limitations and difficulties of various definitions, the paper scrutinizes two attempts to “measure” stateness by creating indexes of state failure and fragility. It argues that both indexes are flawed methodologically, and poses the question of why there nonetheless continues to be interest in quantifying the concepts despite the insurmountable problems of measurement

Two concepts of religious freedom in the European Court of Human Rights

In this article, Bhuta revisits the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights’ interpretation of religious freedom in the headscarf cases. He considers how recent historical work on the history of religious freedom and freedom of conscience opens up a new interpretation of these decisions. The court has been criticized as adopting a militantly secular approach to the presence of Islamic religious symbols in the public sphere, one seemingly inconsistent with its decision in the Lautsi case permitting the display of crucifixes in Italian classrooms. Bhuta’s essay argues that the inconsistency reflects not, or not only, a cultural hostility toward Islamic religious symbols, nor an unforgiving secularism. Rather, the cases turn on an understanding of certain religious symbols as threats to public order and harbingers of sectarian strife. This understanding evokes two different historical understandings of the concept of freedom of conscience: an early modern preoccupation with religious plurality as threatening public order, and a postwar understanding of religious freedom as the protection of secularized Christian values against the totalitarian propensities of modern politics.Published version of EUI LAW WP 2012/3

Rethinking the Universality of Human Rights: A Comparative Historical Proposal for the Idea of ‘Common Ground’ with Other Moral Traditions

This chapter argues that when looking for “common ground” between different moral and religious traditions, a historical approach which takes into account the historicity of specific norms and practices is desirable. Rather than take one set of principles as the universal norms to which other values must be assimilated, I argue that we must relativize both sets of values by trying to grasp their meaning and social significance within specific historical formations of politics, power and place