PLEASE NOTE DATE AND LOCATION
Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Constitutional Roundtable
presents
Professor Aeyal M. Gross
Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law
Global Values and Local Realities: The Case of Israeli Constitutional Law
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, February 11, 2009
FACULTY COMMON ROOM – FLAVELLE HOUSE
78 Queen’s Park
Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence stipulated that the new state would adopt a Constitution. A stormy Knesset debate produced a compromise measure: the Knesset would enact a series of Basic Laws to eventually be united into a Constitution. By the early 1990s, two Basic Laws were needed to complete the Constitution-making process: one to determine the supremacy of the Basic Laws and judicial review and the other to provide a comprehensive bill of rights. Attempts to formulate a complete Bill of Rights faltered on issues such as equality, religion, and land policy. Another compromise to approach the project on a incremental basis produced two Basic Laws in 1992. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty protected a limited number of classic rights and freedoms. Basic Law: Occupation offered protection for freedom of vocation, profession and trade. From its earliest days, the Israeli Supreme Court had developed an unwritten constitutional tradition. Values derived from different sources, global and local, infused the development and legitimation of an unwritten Bill of Rights. After 1992, these values infused the interpretation and application of the new rights-protecting basic laws. This paper examines the values embedded in Israel’s constitutional order, in both its written and unwritten aspects. In particular, it analyzes the tensions between global values and local values and realities within the Israeli constitutional order. I argue that Israeli constitutional discourse invokes values selectively, often to serve ideological projects, for example, invoking “human dignity” to affirm the entrenchment of a neo-liberal order. I will also argue that the turn to global values often obscures the constitutional affirmation of the ethno-national definition of the state and the reality of a long-term occupation eroding democracy’s most basic tenets.
Aeyal Gross LLB (magna cum laude) (Tel-Aviv) 1990, SJD (Harvard) 1996, Diploma in Human Rights (European University Institute, Florence) 1998, is a full time tenured faculty member at the Tel -Aviv University Faculty of Law. In 1995 he was an intern with the European Commission on Human Rights.
Dr. Gross served on the board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. He was also a board member at the Concord Center for the Interplay between International Norms and Israeli Law in the College of Management, and at the Academic Committee of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Tel-Aviv University. In 2003-6, he taught during the summer term at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was also a fellow with the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa, and, in 2007-9 he is a visiting fellow with the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London and teaching as a visitor at SOAS, also at the University in London. In 2009-10 he will be the Global Health and Human Rights fellow at Harvard Law School. Dr. Gross' research interests include international, constitutional, human rights, and humanitarian law; the law of occupation; health rights; sexuality and the law and queer theory, and critical theories of law. He has published and lectured extensively in Israel, Europe, North America, and South Africa. He is most recently the co-editor of Exploring Social Rights (Hart, 2007).
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Professor Lorraine Weinrib at l.weinrib@utoronto.ca or Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
