The purpose of this paper is to examine home-schooling for religious reasons in Stockholm’s municipality. The study was conducted by interviewing actors in Educational board in Stockholm’s municipality and families leaving Stockholm for home-schooling due to religious reasons. By doing so, the paper aims to find how the members of Educational board and the families interpret the home-schooling law, their view on home-schooling for religious reasons and to examine how the answers relate to the theoretical state-religion perspectives. The main research questions investigated are: 1. How is the law of home-schooling interpreted by Education board in Stockholm’s municipality and how does this interpretation vary from that of families’ who home-school for religious reasons? 2. How do the members of Education board in Stockholm’s municipality and the families home-schooling for religious reasons view home-schooling for religious reasons? 2.1 What theoretical perspectives on state-religion relationship can be found in the answers of the two groups? The method used to answer these questions was a dimensional analysis model for empirical interview-data. The aim of the dimensional model was to present and analyse empirical data to answer the research questions. From the families’ answers, it was concluded that that there is a clear tendency in answers in all the following dimensions: law-interpretation, view on home-schooling, and perspectives on state-religion relations. The same tendency was found in the answers of the members from Educational board on the law and home-schooling meaning questions (research questions 1. and 2.), but not on state-religion relation question (research question 2.1).

In this essay, I aim to elucidate a concept of public justification. I outline several challenges faced by political philosophers, including a desire to secure stability and treat people respectfully against a background of reasonable pluralism. I suggest that John Rawls‟ account of public reason provides a helpful starting point for accomplishing these goals. But critics have been both persistent and persuasive in their objections to public reason‟s central element of reasons all can accept. I explicate three dominant criticisms: incomprehensibility, attenuation and exclusion. First, some critics have argued that the very idea of reasons all can accept cannot be plausibly articulated. Second, critics maintain that the set of reasons all can accept is insufficiently robust to solve constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Third, critics note that if public justification is constrained by reasons all can accept, then many informative and effective arguments must be excluded from the public sphere. In response to these criticisms, I argue for an interpretation of reasons all can accept which is sensitive to critics‟ reasonable demand for an explicit account of each element of the doctrine. My interpretation demonstrates the superfluity of what I call the sharability constraint—the thesis that only reasons acceptable to all can function as justifications in the public sphere. Once the sharability constraint is rejected, I argue that the problem of exclusion dissipates, but that substantive restrictions on acceptable reasons are still possible. I am optimistic that this approach is less attenuating than one constrained by sharability and that, at least under favourable empirical conditions, more problems can be resolved by this approach than by standard Rawlsian theory. I draw on actual convergence in the international realm to bolster this optimism. Finally, I relate this approach to the widespread influence of deliberative democracy. I argue that procedural apparatuses are insufficient for political legitimacy, but that deliberation may be an invaluable tool for uncovering reasons required by substantive justification. / Graduate