ICON S Conference 17 – 19 June 2016 Humboldt University Berlin

Committee on the Rights of the Child are addressed
as well as possible problems arising from borrowing
a concept from another treaty system.
David Fagelson: Contested Concepts of Personhood
in American Public Law
My paper examines how evolving concepts of personhood
in science, politics, war and even corporate
governance have changed the idea of personhood on
which legal status and citizenship are based. Some
of these shifts, like the creation of ‘enemy combatant’
alter the laws of war, other shifts, like the granting of
privileges and immunities to corporations blur the
boundaries between persons, citizens and others
who are neither. This alters our understanding of who
is within law, how they are meant to be regulated, and
perhaps most importantly, what this means for our
associative obligations to each other. Finally, evolutionary
biology challenges our traditional conception
of free will and individual responsibility that is at the
root of the idea of the person regulated by law. If
theories of human cooperation posited by this field
are borne out the person we thought was the subject
of law will not exist and cannot be accommodated by
existing conceptions of law.
Pratyush Kumar: Religion influencing Public
Sphere, Public Reason and Public Law discourse
in Colonial and Post-Colonial India
The three strands of political processes in India: (a)
religious pluralism and enlightened religion-inspired
social reform movements from 19 th century onwards;
(b) multiculturalism- and pluralism-informed India’s
struggle for independence; (c) and India’s multicultural
and plural identities shaping public sphere and public
reason, in answering how religion has shaped public
reason, public sphere and public law. These three
strands of political processes lead to three claims in my
project: (1) India has its own form of evolving secularism
& the transplantation of western ideas has evidently not
worked in tempering and controlling, if not eliminating,
the increased communal violence amongst different
communities (post India’s colonial contact); (2) Western
secularism can’t grasp the religiously informed
imagination of the majority in the sense of majority of
Indian public and not majority of a particular community
and finally, and most emphatically; (3) aspects of public
law are shaped by religion. The Indian experience
is of increasing relevance for the whole world in how
to grapple with the different and difficult fault lines of
religious, ethnic and the other dozens of differences
which exist.
Luke Beck: The Theological History of
Australia’s Constitutional Separation of Church
and State Provision
Section 116 of Australia’s Constitution states “The
Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing
any religion, or for imposing any religious observance,
or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and
no religious test shall be required as a qualification for
any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.”
Section 116 was adopted by the Constitution’s drafters
largely in response to petitioning organized by Seventh
Day Adventists. The Adventists were worried that the
Convention’s acquiescence to the Protestant Council
of Churches’ demand for a reference to God in the
constitutional preamble would allow the new Federal
Parliament to legislate for religious observances. The
Adventists also believed that referring to God in the
preamble would create the new Australian nation with
a definite religious character. My paper explores the
theological and legal thinking of the Adventists to explain
how they came to believe what, on a strict legal
analysis, was absurd.
Concurring panels 178