Legal Theory
Legal Systems and Public Attitudes During Negotiations Towards Transition from Conflict to Reconciliation: The Middle East; 1992-1994
Transitions from one state of affairs to another require complex and related changes in both laws and social atitudes. Law is usually past-regarding while changes usually require a future-regarding attitude. It is hard to combine justice and reco...
Custom in the Enforcement of the Law: the Power of the Attorney-General
This article is a synopsis of a monograph which will be published shortly (in Hebrew) by the Harry Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law. I dedicate it to Professor Tedeschi because he was the one who triggered it ten years...
Center Court
A book review of "Judicial Activism, For and Against: The Role of the High Court of Justice in Israeli Society" by Ruth Gavison, Mordechai Kremnitzer, and Yoav Dotan. Gordon evaluates the arguments of the book and makes comments on the legitimacy...
A constitution for Israel: Lessons from the American Experiment
Recent years have seen the emergence in Israel of a public debate over whether to adopt a formal constitution, what values and institutions such a constitution ought to enshrine, and how to go about formulating and ratifying it. While any serious ...
The Role of Courts in Rifted Democracies
Independent courts are very central elements of the rule of law and democracy. At the same time, criticism of judicial performances may be legitimate and even justified. Courts are not elected powers. Their legitimacy stems from the fact that th...
Holmes' Heritage: Living Greatly in the Law
"...I say - and I say no longer with any doubt - that a man may live greatly in the law as well as elsewhere; that there as well as elsewhere he may wreak himself upon life, may drink the bitter cup of heroism, may wear his heart out after the un...
Feminism and the Public/Private Distinction
Summary: ... In this paper I want to examine, in some detail, the identification of one such villain: the "public/private distinction." ... For these reasons, my focus on the feminist challenge to the public/private distinction should be relevant ...
Legal Theory and the Role of Rules
"Before I consider Frederick Schauer's Rules and the Rule of Lawl in detail, let me emphasize the ways in which I agree with him. I have sympathy with Schauer's theoretical agenda and agree with most of his theses. I believe that it is both import...
The Implications of Jurisprudential Theories for Judicial Election, Selection and Accountability
... To establish the implications, if any, of jurisprudential theories for the election, selection, and accountability of judges, we need to establish links between typical answers to questions of legal theory presented by various theories of law...
It is very appropriate to open a discussion of H. L. A. Hart's legal philosophy by looking into the nature and status of theories about law, since Hart was one of the first scholars to make a contribution to this question. Questions such as what w...
The relationship in contemporary legal systems between written and unwritten sources of law
As the purpose of this essay is to emphasize the special elements of the Israeli legal system, the jurisprudential questions which are liable to arise incidental to any attempt to define the borderline between legal sources and other sources of la...