Law School course examines how Buddhism intersects with constitutional law

New Law School course brings scholars together to study intersection of religion, law. With an estimated 500 million followers worldwide, Buddhism has had a far-reaching impact on constitutional design and reform in many countries. Yet, the relationship between the religion and this area of law has been the subject of comparatively little academic scholarship. To help change that, a new interdisciplinary course at the University of Chicago Law School brought scholars from around the world together in a virtual format to study Buddhism's relationship to constitutional practice. The course, "Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law," combined a winter seminar for students with a workshop series that allowed leading scholars of anthropology, political science, religion and law to present their ongoing work to a global audience. Two dozen students from the Law School, the Divinity School and the Division of the Social Sciences participated in the seminar. For the workshop component, they joined scholars, government workers and graduate students from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Brazil, India, Australia, Japan and more than a dozen other countries.