1 Philosophy, Law, and Religion Daniel Whistler and Daniel J. Hill [1] Introduction Whenever philosophers begin talking about the law, there immediately arises the question of the legitimacy of such talk—of, that is, the very idea of philosophers’ contributing anything useful to discussions of legal cases (which, in the present essay, are limited to cases concerning religious freedom). And yet philosophers have in fact contributed much to understanding such cases, and these contributions can be sorted into two categories. On the one hand, there is a ‘bottom-up’ approach that engages in detail with the cases themselves in order to work up to more general philosophical issues. A good example of this approach is Calder and Smith’s painstaking analysis of competing understandings of equality and diversity in Azmi v Kirklees MBC. 1 On the other hand, there is a ‘top-down’ approach in which pre-existing philosophical frameworks are applied to the topic of religious freedom. Trigg’s Religion in Public Life 2 and Equality, Freedom and Religion, 3 as well as Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion?, 4 exemplify this approach. To be a bit more specific: Trigg’s books exemplify the top-down approach by deploying abstract topics in the philosophy of religion (such as the rationality of faith and the weight of religious reasons in the public sphere) to critique the way in which freedom of religion is treated in the courts. The benefit of this top-down vantage point is that the philosopher can scrutinize alternatives not yet countenanced in the courts’ judgments themselves. For example, Trigg 1 Gideon Calder and Steven R. Smith, ‘Differential Treatment and Employability: A UK Case Study of Veil - wearing in Schools’ in Gideon Calder and Emanuela Ceva (eds), Diversity in Europe: Dilemmas of Differential Treatment in Theory and Practice (Routledge 2011), 157–69. The case discussed is Azmi v Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council [2007] UKEAT 0009_07_3003, [2007] IRLR 434. 2 Roger Trigg, Religion in Public Life: Must Faith be Privatised? (OUP 2007). 3 Roger Trigg, Equality, Freedom and Religion (OUP 2012). 4 Brian Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press 2013).