Jack Balkin has posted a new article at SSRN that discusses Jewish law, Must We Be Faithful to Original Meaning? This essay responds to essays written for a symposium on Living Originalism that will appear in the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies. It expands and develops the book’s argument for fidelity to original meaning. First, [...]
Prof. Menachem Elon z”l was one of the scholars most responsible for promoting the school of Mishpat Ivri, or “Hebrew Law.” Prof. Elon defined Mishpat Ivri in the following manner: The term mishpat Ivri…is now generally accepted as embracing only those matters of the halakhah (Jewish law) whose equivalent is customarily dealt with in other [...]
Yeshiva University’s Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Cardozo Law School is presenting the following lecture by Yair Lorberbaum: Annual Ivan Meyer Lecture in Jewish Law Wednesday, February 6, 6-8pm Jacob Burns Moot Court Room Cardozo Law School, 55 Fifth Avenue Yair Lorberbaum (Professor of Law, Bar-Ilan University Law Faculty), this year’s Ivan [...]
(From THE BLOG OF THE CENTER FOR JEWISH LAW) Alexander Kaye, former CJL Graduate Fellow in Jewish Law and Interdisciplinary Studies and currently the Tikvah Post-Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Thought at Princeton, recently completed his PhD at Columbia’s history department. His dissertation, ‘The Legal Philosophies of Religious Zionism, 1937-1967,’ is an important contribution to scholarship [...]
In Makor Rishon’s Musaf Shabbat, Harel Gordin reviews (Hebrew) Ariel Pickar’s new book, Halakhah be-Olam Ḥadash (“Halakhah in a New World”).
The Legal History Blog links to the articles from UC Irvine Law Review’s symposium on Theory and Method in Legal History. All of the articles can be found here. The following may be of special interest to readers of this blog: Shai J. Lavi, Enchanting a Disenchanted Law: On Jewish Ritual and Secular History in [...]
The video below is from the panel discussion, Stanley Fish and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on Law, Interpretation, and Truth from 2010. The panel featured Stanley Fish, Daniel Rynhold, and William Kolbrener.
Below is a video of a lecture by Lawrence Kaplan on “Can the Halakhah Suspend One’s Emotions? Rabbi Soloveitchik, Rashi, and Maimonidies on the Laws of Mourning.”
Ḥullin 58a (original, English trans.) is one of the places in the Talmud where the phrase כח דהיתרא עדיף (“the strength of the lenient ruling is preferable”) appears. Many people are familiar with the use of the phrase in post-Talmudic literature, where it signifies the preference to rule leniently in questions of law. What some [...]
The limits that a democratic society can place on the freedom of speech is a difficult question. During the past few days this question has been in the headlines in Israel. The reason for this is that the police detained Rabbi Dov Lior after he refused the be investigated regarding the approbation that he wrote [...]
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