Dear Friends,

Autumn 2009 signals for the International Center for Law and Religion Studies the beginning of a new era in communication with our colleagues around the world. This year, for the first time, we offered a live stream of the opening addresses of our Annual International Law and Religion Symposium.  We also announce improvements in our written communication.  For more than a year the Center has been updating and modernizing its websites and developing a new proprietary software that permits electronic newsletters to be created from information already posted to any of our four sites. With these new and expanding capabilities available to us, we wish to solicit your active input on timely matters affecting international law and religion.  Our websites are intended to become hubs where anyone can quickly and easily find the following information:

• statutory laws
• constitutional provisions
• cases, including court briefs, arguments and commentary
• reports on the state of religious liberty by governments and NGOs
• law and religion conferences
• scholarship, essays and analysis
• appointments to government, international organizations or NGOs affecting law and religion matters
• awards and recognitions to leaders in the law and religion community
• initiatives, reforms and challenges to global religious liberty goals

Already available on our www.iclrs.org website is the ability to access, in multiple languages, written, audio, and visual records of presentations delivered during our Annual Law and Religion Symposium. Our new database, www.religlaw.org, slated to be fully operable by the time of our Annual Symposium in October 2009, will allow users worldwide to quickly upload information that other users will be able to locate and search free of charge. We anticipate that this database will become an important resource for anyone with serious interest in law and religion subjects. Our new website www.strasbourgconsortium.org is developing into a premier vehicle for tracking and assessing information about the European Court of Human Rights and associated cases and issues. And finally, we are about to unveil our newest site, www.nepalconstitution.org, which will serve as a forum for analysis of constitutional issues in Nepal.

We hope you will find our websites and newsletters helpful. Please contact us at [email protected] with your suggestions and comments.

Warmest Regards,

Robert T. Smith
Managing Director
International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University