"Legal Multiculturalism: Comparing Gays and Muslims"
Migration and Membership in Troubled Times - Ethics, Law and Politics, Seminar Series 2016/17
- Date: Oct 18, 2016
- Time: 03:00 PM - 04:45 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Christian Joppke (University of Bern)
- Christian Joppke holds a chair in sociology at the University of Bern (CH). He is also a recurrent Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University, Budapest, and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University. He is Member of the German Expert Council on Integration and Migration (SVR). A UC Berkeley Ph.D. (1989), Joppke has taught at the University of Southern California, European University Institute, University of British Columbia (Vancouver), International University Bremen, and the American University of Paris. He also held fellowships at Georgetown University and at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. His recent books are Legal Integration of Islam (with John Torpey) (Harvard UP 2013), The Secular State under Siege: Religion and Politics in Europe and America (Cambridge: Polity 2015), and Is Multiculturalism Dead? Crisis and Persistence in the Constitutional State (Cambridge: Polity 2017).
- Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
- Room: Library Hall
For more details please contact recke(at)mmg.mpg.de.
There has been much talk about the ‘retreat’ or ‘death’ of multiculturalism. Much of this discussion confounds multiculturalism with explicit policy under that name. I argue that liberal law itself, in particular majority-constraining constitutional law, requires multiculturalism, understood as multiple ways of life that cannot and should not be contained by a state that is to be neutral about individuals’ ultimate values and commitments. The workings of legal multiculturalism are demonstrated through a comparison of benchmark jurisprudence on gays in America and Muslims in Europe.“