ABSTRACT
Religious legal traditions are filled with dynamism and change, with laws, legal actors, modes of interpretation, and legal structures and processes all subject to temporal and contextual shifts. The Bahá’í Faith reflects this legal dynamism. While the Bahá’í community is in the earliest stage of the development of its legal dimensions, there exists within the Bahá’í Faith an intentional dynamism within Bahá’í law, which is embedded in the scriptural and authoritative sources of the Bahá’í teachings, and reflected in how Bahá’í laws are received, understood, analysed, and used. The patterns of growth and change within the Bahá’í Faith, as well as social contexts and realities, are both explicitly positioned by Bahá’u’lláh as vital to shaping the understanding, development, and application of His laws. This chapter provides an overview of the laws of the Bahá’í Faith, including Bahá’u’lláh’s Kitáb-i-Aqdas, which is His central book of scripture and foundational legal text, in order to identify how and why Bahá’í law has evolved as it has until now, and what the future may hold.
