Centre for Legal Theory hosts Visiting Scholar Farrah Ahmed at NUS Law

The Centre for Legal Theory was pleased to host Associate Professor Farrah Ahmed from Melbourne Law School as a Visiting Scholar in November and December 2019.

As part of the visit, Farrah delivered a seminar on 2 December titled “Expressive Claims about Symbolic Establishment”. Farrah’s paper interrogated the concept of ‘symbolic establishment’ which refers to arrangements where a national church or religion has symbolic or ceremonial privileges, for example, religious symbols on the national flag or prayer in Parliament.

In such systems, everyone has religious freedom and there is no discrimination based on religion and the national church or religion receives no state funding. The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Denmark and the other Nordic countries might be thought of as having elements of ‘symbolic establishment’.

During the seminar, Farrah pushed back on various claims made with respect to symbolic establishment by courts and academics. Is religious establishment wrong when it is ‘merely symbolic’? Symbolic establishment is widely thought – by philosophers, legal scholars and judges – to be wrong because of what it expresses. But, the typical arguments about what establishment (and indeed other legal and political arrangements) express are obscure. How are we to understand what a law privileging a church or religion expresses? To put it differently, how are we to know when expressive claims about symbolic establishment are true?

During the seminar, Farrah put forward the argument that we can only know if such expressive claims are true by disambiguating them and recognising the distinct senses in which symbolic establishment is said to be expressive.

The well-attended seminar involved an engaged discussion from the floor on key aspects of Farrah’s thesis, including whether there may be other types of symbolic establishment that merit attention and other arguments in favour of and against expressive claims regarding symbolic establishment.