Likhovski on Jewish Legal Scholars and Roman Law in Mandatory Palestine

Assaf Likhovski, Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law, has posted The Eagle and the Dove: Jewish Law Scholars and Roman Law during the Interwar Period, which appears in Pensiero giuridico occidentale e giuristi romani: Eredità e genealogie, ed. Pierre Bonin, Nader Hakim, Fara Nasti and Aldo Schiavone (Torino: G. Giappichelli, 2019), 267-294:

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a group of Jewish legal scholars working in Eastern Europe, and later in Mandatory Palestine, sought to « revive » (i.e., modernize) Jewish law and turn it into the legal system of the Jewish community in Palestine — and later the legal system of the State of Israel. Inspired by the nationalist legal ideas of the German historical school, as well as the successful revival of the Hebrew language, the Jewish legal revival project created a body of scholarship on Jewish law, established the first Jewish law school in Mandatory Palestine, and even influenced the work of a unique communal court system that functioned in the Jewish community in Palestine until the end of British rule in that territory.

The Jewish legal revival project had an ambivalent attitude to Roman law (both ancient and modern). Modern scholarship on Roman law, especially nineteenth-century German legal scholarship, was seen as a model to be emulated by the Jewish legal revivers. Indeed, the Jewish legal revival project was often simply understood as a process of reorganization of the materials of Jewish law based on legal categories, models, and methodologies taken from modern Roman law scholarship. On the other hand, the legal revivers saw Roman law as the « other » of Jewish law, often arguing that the principles underlying the latter were utterly different from those of the former. Roman law was thus imagined and used by the early-twentieth-century Jewish law scholars discussed in this article in contradictory ways: sometimes as a legal system that should be emulated, and sometimes as a legal system whose norms and institutions should be shunned. Thus, as this article shows, Roman law, as it was described in the legal thought of the group of legal scholars I study, was used as a foil against which modern Jewish legal identity could be created.

 --Dan Ernst

Bhandar on colonialism and property

Brenna Bhandar, School of Oriental and African Studies, has published Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership with Duke University Press. From the publisher: 

In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

Praise for the book: 

"I am obsessed with the force and eloquence with which [Bhandar] analyzes the birth of private property and its ongoing devastating effects. This book is going to be precious to me and many other people, too."  -Jordy Rosenberg

“Brenna Bhandar's enthralling book peels the veneer of property law from that which lies concealed beneath—the multiplicitous structures of dominance that define our contemporary settler-colonial world, all the way from Parramatta to Palestine. Here is a trenchant reassertion of the capacities of Marxist analysis to plumb dispossessions both historic and current, and to expose the entwined regimes of ownership and of racial hegemony that sustain them.” -Christopher Tomlins

“In this original study, Brenna Bhandar analyzes the constitutive role of colonialism in the development of modern property law and the modern legal subject. Bhandar's sophisticated comparative research on the political-economic imagination and legal infrastructure of settler colonialism is completely fascinating. And her stunning elaboration of what she names 'racial regimes of ownership' is utterly brilliant. A timely and essential book that will fundamentally change the way we think about race, property, and subjectivity.”  -Avery F. Gordon

Further information is available here.