04 August 2025
Behemoth v. The Dual State in the Gaza War
Fraenkel’s The Dual State (1941) and Neumann’s Behemoth (1942) offer two diverging accounts of the legal reality under National Socialism. The controversy between the two is important not only for the Gaza War, but also for the future of international humanitarian law writ large. The picture, according to which if lawyers had more power post-World War I, democracies in Europe would not have collapsed, affected both constitutional and international law. Yet, the claim that Weimar and the world could have been saved if only the law and lawyers had possessed more power is inaccurate. We are now reliving the consequences of this mistake in the Gaza War. Continue reading >>
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20 June 2025
Democracy Washing
The Israeli Supreme Court has recently adopted a highly activist approach in rulings that claim to strengthen the structural foundations of democracy, while neglecting its role in protecting the basic human rights of Palestinians. The stark contrast between the Court’s handling of cases involving Palestinians detained incommunicado and its swift intervention in the dismissal of the Shin Bet Director reflects a deeper pattern in the Court’s recent jurisprudence, one that can be described as “democracy washing”. Continue reading >>
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27 November 2024
The Silence of the Israeli Supreme Court Judges
The arrest warrants by the ICC for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity are a red card for the Israeli legal system indicating grave doubts whether the Israeli legal system fulfills the complementarity requirement. Paradoxically, an indictment on the Israeli justice system arrives after the Israeli Supreme Court has recently fortified its position. Yet, the more the Court expanded its reach into the political arena, the less it could fulfill its core role of defending basic human rights. Continue reading >>
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28 April 2017
Trapped in the Age of Trump: the American Supreme Court and 21st Century Populism
The American Supreme Court is currently ill-equipped to confront populism. [...] Continue reading >>
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