Although we tend to think of sharia as this single set of laws that all Muslims follow, that’s ridiculous; there are numerous competing interpretations of sharia, just as there are within any legal tradition.
For his part he had studied law by a sort of family tradition; and had then remained a burden on his widowed mother, who already hardly knew how to dispose of her two daughters.
So that notion crosses the Atlantic Ocean and becomes a part of the American tradition of law, so that when the colonies are coming up, they have trial by jury and they have juries.
National legal traditions, the common law, the forms of government that have been imported from Britain, and of course Christianity, which they considered to be part of their inheritance.
Maybe a helpful way to think about it, Justice Kavanaugh, is we're looking for words that have a real rights-creating pedigree in our nation's history and legal traditions.
Because before they came along, most states already had self-defense laws on the books that traditionally, included an element known as a duty to retreat.