Berkowitz Fellows

2013-2014 Jonathan Yovel

Professor of law and humanities at the University of Haifa, Israel. He has studied law, philosophy and linguistics at Tel Aviv, Oxford, Northwestern and Chicago.  His diverse work lies mostly at the junction of the linguistic construction of normativity in various forms, yet he has also worked and published in legal theory, international and comparative law, contract law theory, formal and applied logic, human rights law, political theory, pragmatics and metapragmatics, law and literature, Biblical hermeneutics, law and cinema and the epistemological relations between law and the social sciences. 

RESEARCH:

The Languages of Justice

2012-2013 Shai Wozner

Senior lecturer in Tel Aviv university faculty of law. He studied many years in Hebron Yeshiva in Jerusalem, received his B.A. in Talmud from Bar-Ilan University, and LL.B, LL.M, and LL.D (Cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  He was also a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem for more than 10 years.

RESEARCH:

2011-2012 Marc Hirshman

Teaches rabbinic thought and midrash at the Melton Centre for Jewish Education of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he is the incumbent of the Mandel Chair in Jewish Education. He serves also as the director of the Institute for Research on the Land of Israel at Yad Ben Zvi in Jerusalem.

RESEARCH:

Studies in Rabbinic Thought: Education, Secular Knowledge, Pray and Israel

2010-2011 Gabriella Blum

Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, as well as the co-director of the HLS-Brookings Project on Law and Security at Harvard Law School, where she teaches international law and international conflict management.

RESEARCH:

The Fog of Victory

2009-2010 Rabbi Saul J. Berman

Ordained at Yeshiva University, from which he also received his B.A. and his  M.H.L. He completed a degree in law, a J.D., at New York University, and an M.A. in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

RESEARCH:

2007-2008 Dr. Joseph David

Received a B.A. in philosophy and Jewish history from the Open University and a LL.B. from Bar Ilan University, Israel. His M.A. and Ph.D. are in philosophy and Jewish thought from the Hebrew University, Israel. He is the editor of The State of Israel: Between Judaism and Democracy (Israel Democracy Institute, 2003), and Questioning Dignity: Human Dignity as Supreme Modern Value, (Magnes Press, 2006). He is also the author of the forthcoming Between Logos and Nomos – Studies in Jewish Comparative Jurisprudence.  His research proposal is entitled "Legal Imagination and Religious Identity in Jewish and Islamic Jurisprudential Thought."

2006-2007 Dr. Leora Batnitzky

Associate Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She received a B.A. in philosophy from Barnard College, Columbia University and a B.A. in biblical studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.  Her M.A. and Ph.D. are in religion from Princeton University. Professor Batnitzky's research and teaching have focused on modern religious thought and on Jewish thought particularly. Increasingly, she has focused on the historical and philosophical continuities between religious thought and political theory as they relate to the development of modern legal theory.

2005-2006 Dr. Shahar Lifshitz

Senior lecturer, Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He received a Bachelor Degree in Law and Psychology from Bar-Ilan University in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Law from the same institution in 2002. His doctoral dissertation, which received a distinction, is titled Contractual Regulation of Spousal Relationship in Civil Law. Dr. Lifshitz's areas of academic interest are contractual law and family law especially the philosophical basis of these fields.  At NYU School of Law,  he will work on projects in the subjects of cohabitation law and property relationship between spouses as well as on project deals with "Unconscionability Contracts: A Jewish Law Perspective."