The city of Palitana, India, has become the first region known to legally install de facto meat bans, essentially making Palitana a vegetarian city by law. These legal steps seem to be the direct result of social pressure put on local legislators in the form of a mass hunger strike performed by local Jain monks. This thesis is aimed at discussing the background of this case, its connections to a broader general discussion of moral and ethical vegetarianism, and arguments in favor of and against the legal installment of a meat ban in the Palitana case. It is concluded that although the meat ban is ideologically and theoretically speaking ethically justifiable and defensible it is in practice, at least in its current form, not ethically desirable.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:27:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 OthonMMA.pdf: 955144 bytes, checksum: 29d720958ad489287500017f5cfaa75c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-08-23 / In Brazil, constitutional clauses regarding religious freedom have concrete applications in Private Law. Church-State Law, or "Ecclesiastical Law of the State," studies the legal principles which may be applicable to religious activity, exercised individually and collectively. The study of Church-State Law in Brazil lacks a thorough introduction to the constitutional and civil aspects of religious organizations: such an introduction is the main end of this work. Following a brief introduction, the main aspects of religious freedom and the principle of private autonomy as it concerns religious organizations are explained. A careful introductory analysis of Church-State Law in Brazil is thus developed: (1) the historical aspects, including a detailed account of the relations between Catholicism, the established religion up to 1889, and the government; (2) the current constitutional principles, as presented in the text of the federal Constitution of 1988, regarding the rights and claims of religious organizations; (3) how the same constitutional principles are to be used in the interpretation of Private Law (especially the Civil Code of 2002), fostering and preserving the uniqueness of religious organizations in the Brazilian legal system. A brief complementary chapter presents some aspects of the legal position of religious institutions in three other nations whose constitutional documents have influenced the current Brazilian federal Constitution (France, Spain, and the United States) / As garantias constitucionais de prote??o ? liberdade religiosa t?m aplica??o concreta no Direito Privado. O Direito Eclesi?stico do Estado (isto ?, o estudo das normas jur?dicas aplic?veis ao fen?meno religioso, em suas manifesta??es individuais ou coletivas) carece, no Brasil, de um estudo introdut?rio da posi??o constitucional e infraconstitucional das organiza??es religiosas, lacuna que o presente texto visa suprir. A breve an?lise abrangente do problema, segue-se apresenta??o dos princ?pios da liberdade religiosa e da autonomia privada aplicada ?s organiza??es religiosas. Um estudo cuidadoso sobre o hist?rico do Direito brasileiro do fen?meno religioso prefacia os pontos centrais da pesquisa: a defini??o dos princ?pios constitucionais estruturais do Direito Eclesi?stico no Brasil e a aplica??o pr?tica desses princ?pios no ?mbito do Direito Privado das pessoas jur?dicas de natureza religiosa (as organiza??es religiosas). Finalmente, apresenta-se a situa??o das pessoas jur?dicas religiosas no Direito Comparado, escolhidos ordenamentos jur?dicos nacionais que tamb?m guiam-se pela autonomia das esferas pol?tica e religiosa