Alon Harel

Senior Global Research Fellow
Israel
ah7452@nyu.edu

Alon Harel is Mizock Professor of Law and a member of Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University. Professor Harel works in several fields: moral and political philosophy, criminal law theory, constitutional law theory and also law and economics and behavioral law and economics.

His book Why Law Matters (OUP, 2014) challenges the view that law is merely an instrument designed to render the right or correct in decisions. Contemporary political and legal theory typically justifies the value of political and legal institutions on the grounds that such institutions bring about desirable outcomes - such as justice, security, and prosperity. Why Law Matters presents the argument that legal institutions and legal procedures are valuable and matter as such, irrespective of their instrumental value. The book shows that instrumental justifications fail to identify what is really valuable about public institutions and fail to account for their enduring appeal.

His most recent book Reclaiming the Public (CUP, 2024) develops a theory of political authority. In this book Harel argues that ultimately the state’s authority is grounded in its ability to speak in the name of all. This explains why political authority is necessarily public; it represents those who are subject to it and, consequently, those who are subject to it are, in principle, accountable for the authority’ decisions. Further, he argues that the value of public institutions is not grounded (only) in the contingent fact that such institutions are particularly accountable to the public. Instead, some goods are intrinsically public; their value hinges on their public provision.

During his stay at NYU, Professor Harel plans to write a book on constitutional theory where he aims to establish that there is a distinct value in entrenching rights in the Constitution rather than merely protecting them in legislation. More specifically he wishes to establish the claim that the institutional source of a legal norm—be it the constitution, legislation, and so on—affects its nature and value. When different institutions use identically-worded norms, say, ‘everyone is equally entitled to X,’ they may nevertheless produce different norms and provide different goods. For instance, a constitutional protection of a basic right differs from a statutory right to the same right not (only) because the former is less likely to be changed but because a constitutional decision marks the right in question as one that makes no essential reference to the actual choice of the majority of the political community.

Center Affiliation: Center for Law and Philosophy
Research Project: A Liberal Perspective of Constitutionalism