Israel’s Constitutional Project — Past and Future

Please join YLSIA for a discussion with Prof. Alon Harel (Hebrew University) and Prof. Ronit Levine-Schnur (Tel-Aviv University) on Israel’s constitutional project – its founding history, current challenges, and future development. Professor Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law, will be the chair of the event. 

Kosher lunch will be provided. 

Alon Harel will focus on “The Power of The Israeli Court to Invalidate Basic Laws: A Jurisprudential Account”. Harel is a Mizock professor at the law faculty at the Hebrew University and a member of Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality. He also serves as a Senior Global Research Fellow in NYU School of Law. Harel’s areas of research include moral, political and legal philosophy, criminal law, law and economics, and human rights. He is currently working on a book on constitutional theory, and already published other important books including Why Law Matters (OUP, 2014); Reclaiming the Public (CUP, 2024). 

Ronit Levine-Schnur will focus on “A Historical-Empirical Perspective on Institutional Aspects in Constitutional Proposals for Israel”. Levine-Schnur is a Senior Lecturer at the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law. Her areas of research and teaching include Property Law, Administrative and Political Decision-Making, Territorial Conflicts, Democratic Institutions and Procedures, and Middle Eastern Studies. Before joining Tel-Aviv University, she was a faculty member at the Reichman University Law School. Levine-Schnur’s published or edited so far six books, and over 30 articles. As an active academic, Ronit co-founded and led or lead the Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy and the Day After the War Forum. 

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship of democratic values to government services such as courts, prisons, and post offices; the role of collective redress and class actions; contemporary conflicts over privatization; the relationships of states to citizens and non-citizens; the interaction among federal, state, and tribal courts and the forms and norms of federalism; practices of punishment; and equality and gender. Resnik's books include Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (with Dennis Curtis, Yale University Press, 2011); Federal Courts Stories (co-edited with Vicki C. Jackson, Foundation Press, 2010); and Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (co-edited with Seyla Benhabib, NYU, 2009). From 2012-2022, Resnik chaired Yale Law School’s Global Constitutional Law Seminar.