LAW, RELIGION, AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN DAVID LITTLE'S THOUGHT

Abstract

David Little has pioneered the study of religion, human rights, and religious freedom during fifty-five years of distinguished scholarly work at Yale, Harvard, Virginia, Georgetown, and the United States Institute of Peace. Starting with his first major book, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England, he has traced cardinal principles like freedom of conscience and free exercise of religion from their earliest formulations in Stoic philosophy and Roman law, through the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, the medieval canonists and scholastics, and their many early modern heirs. Among the latter, he has explored most deeply the contributions of Protestants to the Western understanding of human rights and religious freedom, with special focus on John Calvin, John Locke, Roger Williams, and Reinhold Niebuhr, all of whose ideas he connects to each other and to the broader Western tradition in fresh and inventive ways. He has written astutely on the vexed questions arising under the First Amendment's guarantees of no government establishments of religion and no prohibitions on its free exercise. And he has charted many of the religious sources and dimensions of modern human rights, particularly the fundamental international protections of freedom of thought, conscience, and belief, freedom from religious hatred, incitement, and discrimination, and freedom for religious and cultural self-determination.