Abstract
I. Symbolic Threats Societies ask courts to repudiate symbols they find threatening. For example, German courts repudiate Holocaust denial; courts in the U.S. South repudiate cross burnings and Ku Klux Klan masks. 1 The symbols, however, do not have meaning by themselves. Instead, it is up to the court to attribute meaning to them. In this process, the courts often privilege the concerns of the specific society within which they operate. Consequently, courts in different settings - or different societies - will treat the same symbol differently. To explore this point, this Article will look at two cases involving the Muslim headscarf - one from Germany, the other from the United States. The Article has two goals. First, it will show that although legal discourses surrounding both cases treated the headscarf as a threat, the threats themselves were presented differently. Second, somewhat more speculatively, the Article will trace the reasons for the different perceptions of the threat to differences in how Germans and those in the United States view religion in general and Islam in particular. The German case began in 1998, when a series of German courts debated whether school authorities in Stuttgart could deny a civil service position as an elementary school teacher to Fereshta Ludin, an Afghani woman, solely because she refused to take off her headscarf while teaching. 2 Ultimately, in 2003 the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in Ludin's favor but only because the state of Baden-Wurttemberg did not specifically ban headscarves, 3