ABSTRACT
This chapter presents main points of agreement across major religious traditions in terms of their rules and customs that regulate the formation and dissolution of marital unions within their respective communities. Religious family laws have long been appropriated by governments and integrated into national legal systems in polities all over the world. It discusses the effects of state appropriation, both on religious traditions themselves and on the rights and freedoms of people who are subject to state-enforced religious family laws. In religiously based legal systems, religion is a matter not just of personal conviction but of public law and policy. Under such systems, judges who apply state-enforced religious laws, or registrars who register births, marriages, and divorces, are both empowered and required by law to scrutinize and determine which religious community each person belongs to. State-enforced religious laws may also impinge upon an individual’s right to fair trial, and to seek effective remedy when his or her rights are violated.
