In this article in (1982) 13 International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 103 Ian Walker considers Hume’s definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature.

As part of this process, Walker expands out this definition, stressing that the violation needs to be non-repeatable as repetition would accord it some degree of regularity, and thus the possibility of according with the laws of nature. I’ve obviously been a legal academic far too long, as this instantly reminds me of constitutional conventions – violate them once and you may face a constitutional crisis; violate them often enough and they cease to be a constitutional convention.

The difficulty with claims of miracles, or have I have described them elsewhere, exceptional claims, is that the very framework by which we decide how to evalute them itself depends on assumptions which the miraculous cast into doubt – assumptions which legal actors are very likely to find more comfortable than the possibility of non-repeatable violations of the laws of nature. As CS Lewis put it:

“If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence ‘according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry’. But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are. For if they are impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then only mathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us; and since history never provides that degree of evidence for any event, history can never convince us that a miracle occurred. If, on the other hand, miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidence will be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of miracles have occurred.”

A party in a legal action sincerely seeking to rely upon the miraculous in their case may wish to reflect on the working out of this conundrum in  Duncan [1944] 1 KB 773, in the Court of Appeal.  Their legal advisor may want to unwind with the excellent Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches by M Gaskill.

In this article, published in (1988) 137 U of Penn Law Review 271, Justin Miller considers shunning – that is, the deliberate withdrawal of social, spiritual and economic contact from someone who is no longer a member in good standing in their religious community. This can have a powerful impact on the person shunned, and, Miller argues, is intentionally harmful conduct. Miller argues that the US had struck the balance between individual and group rights at the wrong place, finding an absolute constitutional protection for shunning which was inappropriate – in part because the free exercise rights of the individual being shunned have not been properly taken into account.

I enjoyed Miller’s focus on the legal relationships between individuals, as opposed to the occasionally too dominant focus on what is often called church/state relations. This shift in emphasis follows if we see a legal relationship between a religious community and its members, rather than simply relationships to the state. Nonetheless, a state retains at interest in how such disputes are resolved. As Miller says, “The state is not a party to the suit; its interests are represented by the court”.

I was less convinced by how firmly Miller came down against a strong right to shun (or rather, right not to be compelled to abstrain from shunning). The right to exit has a long standing place in thinking about religious freedom, and shunning feels to me to be related. The individual may have left the religious community and object to the severity of the consequences which follow; or they may have been expelled from the community against their will. In either case the community, and its individual members, is exiting from a relationship with the shunned person on religious grounds. The harm to the individual – at least in those cases where they have sued – is clear, but three further questions strike me. (a) How much of this harm is the loss of benefits they enjoyed through their former religious affiliation, that is a reduction to the base line had they not been a member of the religious community?; (b) How much of the left-over harm is a burden that the individual bears for exercising their religious rights, while the state respects the  religious rights of others?; (c) Does Free exercise really extend to a legal interest in remaining within a community while rejecting the beliefs of that community to such an extent that it has resolved on shunning, even if (as Miller points out astutely) it is the community that has changed rather than the individual?

For when 140 characters just isn’t enough …

This is a blog for short posts linked to @edge_law the twitter account of Professor Peter W Edge, of the School of Law at Oxford Brookes University. Full professional profile at: http://t.co/PZPHG1iwo3.