ABSTRACT
This chapter originates conversations between two North American scholars of law and religion, one from the US and one from Canada. In the feverish and volatile world of the politics of international religious freedom today, any differences originating in a North American conversation might seem presumptively parochial and yet there are interesting and instructive differences between these two religio-legal cultures that drove us to ask the question more broadly. The book focuses on law and its capacity for being a vehicle for religious freedom. Peter Danchin considers the manifold contradictions in the liberal constitutional model as reflected in the long overdue efforts to recognize Muslim marriage in post-apartheid South Africa. Religion both constitutes and disrupts the realms of the public and the private. Legal pluralism highlights the ways in which a so-called domain of private law enters into the public sphere.
