The Many Exiles of Max Laserson

La vie du juriste juif, russe, letton et américain Max Laserson a été ponctuée par l’émigration et l’exil. Cet article explore l’influence de cette expérience sur ses travaux académiques. Alors que son lectorat et ses sujets de recherche ont évolué au fur et à mesure de ses déplacements, ses origines juives et sa naissance en Lettonie, une région frontalière entre l’est et l’ouest, ont influencé ses recherches tout au long de sa vie. Où qu’il vive, il se présente comme un « juriste frontalier », un intermédiaire ayant transplanté des idées étrangères dans un milieu local.The life of the Jewish-Russian-Latvian-American legal scholar Max Laserson was punctuated by emigration and exile. This article explores the impact that this experience had on his scholarship. While Laserson’s audience and research topics changed as he moved from place to place, his origins as both a Jew and a native of Latvia, a borderland region between East and West, influenced his scholarship throughout his life. Wherever he lived, he became a “borderland jurist”, an intermediary who transplanted foreign ideas to a local audience

Peripheral Vision: Polish-Jewish Lawyers and Early Israeli Law

Some of the founding fathers of Israel's legal system were lawyers educated in Polish law schools. What was the impact of this background on their legal thought? There are few explicit references to Polish law in Israeli legal texts. However, indirectly, legal and constitutional ideas taken from Polish law did appear in Israeli law. This article focuses on the legal writing of four Israeli lawyers in the period immediately after Israel's independence in 1948, showing how Polish law was used by these lawyers as a source for occasional precedents, for critiquing Israeli law (dominated by English law), and, mostly, for constitutional precedents.The relatively greater impact of Polish law in the constitutional realm can be attributed to the fact that Poland (like other new countries established in the interwar period in the periphery of western Europe, such as Ireland) offered Israeli lawyers constitutional models that were both more modern, and more relevant to the specific circumstances of the new state, where religion played an important role in defining the identity of the nation. The history of the impact of Polish law on Israeli law can thus serve as an example of interwar constitutional innovation in the European periphery, and its later impact on post-World War II constitutional law.</jats:p

Can the Knesset Adopt a Constitution which will be the “Supreme Law of the Land”?

In an article published in an earlier issue of this Review, the question was raised whether the courts of Israel have finally reached a conclusion on the question of their own power of judicial review of legislative measures passed by the Knesset. It was submitted that the question should be solved by a political rather than a judicial decision.In the present article it is intended to examine a hypothetical constitutional question, namely, can the Knesset, acting within the framework of the existing legal system, adopt or develop a written, rigid Constitution which would become the “supreme law of the land” and which would be effectively protected by the courts?</jats:p

Tax law and social norms in mandatory Palestine and Israel /

This book describes how a social-norms model of taxation rose and fell in British-ruled Palestine and the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Such a model, in which non-legal means were used to foster compliance, appeared in the tax system created by the Jewish community in 1940s Palestine and was later adopted by the new Israeli state in the 1950s. It gradually disappeared in subsequent decades as law and its agents, lawyers and accountants, came to play a larger role in the process of taxation. By describing the historical interplay between formal and informal tools for creating compliance, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel sheds new light on our understanding of the relationship between law and other methods of social control, and reveals the complex links between taxation and citizenship