The 10th Circuit affirmed a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange in favor of Muneer Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Oklahoma, who had sued claiming the law violated his constitutional rights. The three-judge panel that issued the ruling agreed that the law expressly condemns only one religion, Islam, thus violating the First Amendment's establishment clause, which forbids the government from favoring any religion.
The appellate judges also suggested that the law is pointless: Its supporters admitted "they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied sharia law."
The issue's salience in the United States is more symbolic than legal. Sharia sounds scary to lots of Americans. The irony is that many who think they are opposed to sharia would likely support many of its general precepts. They may be the same people, for instance, who want American judges and lawyers to pay more attention to the Ten Commandments - a kind of reasoning that is encouraged by sharia.
In his book The "Higher Law" Background of American Constitutional Law, Princeton professor Edward S. Corwin argues that American constitutional law was founded not only on the philosophical notions of the Enlightenment, but also on theological affirmations. In fact, he suggested, American jurisprudence rests on a deep ethic that is quite congenial to transcendent, "higher" reasoning.
At root, sharia asserts the same thing. This was what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was trying to say when he provoked a firestorm by telling the BBC that "there are perfectly proper ways the law of the land pays respect to custom and community."
