Pnina Lahav

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Pnina Lahav is an author and the Law Alumni Scholar (emerita) at Boston University School of Law who focuses on Israeli law, Israeli history and culture, constitutional law, comparative law, and civil and political rights. She has been credited with establishing the field of Israeli legal historiography.

Pnina Lahav
Born	1945 Israel
🎓 Alma mater	Hebrew University Yale University Boston University
💼 Occupation	Law professor
👔 Employer	Boston University School of Law

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Biography

Lahav was born in Israel and graduated from Hebrew University, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Laws degree and later from Yale University with an LL.M. and an S.J.D. She also earned a Masters in Political Science from Boston University.

Lahav was a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellow in 1983, working on her biography of Israeli Chief Justice Simon Agranat. Lahav was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 2000 to 2001, where she investigated the Chicago Seven Trial. Lahav was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Spring 2008. Finally, from 2010 to 2011, Lahav served as a religion fellow at the Boston University School of Theology.

Lahav has taught at universities including Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Lyon. Lahav is a past President of the Association for Israel Studies (AIS) and received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 from the Israel Institute and the Association for Israel Studies. She is the Law Alumni Scholar at Boston University School of Law and a member of the faculty of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University.

Scholarship

Books

Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century

Lahav wrote the biography of Simon Agranat, the third Chief Justice of Israel's Supreme Court. The book is based on multiple interviews held with Agranat and other Israeli decision makers and archival research. The biography discusses how Agranat's world view was shaped by Zionism and the American Progressive movement,, allowing him to incorporate American progressive values into Israeli law. In the case of Kol ha-Am, decided five years after the birth of the Israeli state, then Judge Agranat declared that Israeli law did incorporate the value of freedom of expression even though Israel did not have a written constitution and did not expressly recognize political rights. Lahav closes the book with a discussion of the Agranat Commission.

The book is praised for explaining how Agranat shaped emerging Israeli constitutional law through judicial opinions. Lahav, as biographer, was commended for acknowledging what she did not know about her subject and for reflecting candidly on the development of her insights and observations. A common critique of the book was that only eight of Agranat's opinions were discussed in detail, and one reviewer argued Agranat's previous decision in Skornik v. Skornik, should have been taken into account when considering his dissenting opinion in Shalit v. Minister of Interior. Other reviewers approved of Lahav's qualitative approach in highlighting landmark cases, thereby shedding light on not only the social and political history of the case, but also on its jurisprudential background. Lahav avoided the description of multiple cases and instead preferred a qualitative approach that brought to life the interaction of the personal, the legal, and the political. However, many of Agranat's other judicial opinions are referenced in the footnotes of Judgment in Jerusalem, and Lahav collected and published the entire oeuvre of Agranat's opinions in a Festschrift in his honor.

The book was published in 1997 by the University of California Press. Lahav received the Gratz College Centennial Book Award for Judgement in Jerusalem in November 1998, as well as the Seltner Prize in Israel. Lahav also wrote a revised and extended version of the book in Hebrew in 1999, published by Am Oved. The research for these books was supported, in part, by a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and by the Boston University School of Law.

Golda Meir: The Only Woman in the Room

Lahav completed a feminist biography of Golda Meir, Israel's fourth prime minister. The book reviews Meir's rise to power and the hardships she encountered as a woman surrounded by men who did not believe that women should participate in high level politics. It highlights her struggles to balance work and family, her burning ambition to fulfill herself as both a woman desiring of family life and a person interested in politics, and her contributions to the Israeli welfare state. The book contains an analysis of her codification of a new deal for Israel in the early 1950s and will be published by Princeton University Press in Spring 2022.

The History of Law in a Multicultural Israel, 1917-1967

Lahav co-edited The History of Law in a Multicultural Israel, 1917-1967 with Ron Harris, Alexandre Kedar, and Assaf Likhovski. It is a collection of essays and papers presented at the First International Conference of Israeli Legal History at Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities in 1997. The focus of the collected essays, which discussed issues spanning from the start of the British Mandate in Palestine through the Six Day War, was to provide a brief legal historiography of Israel that would encourage further research. Lahav authored a chapter of the book, "The Pains and Gains of Writing Biography: Reflections on Writing the Biography of Chief Justice Simon Agranat," where she documented her thoughts about writing biographies.

Press Law in Modern Democracies: A Comparative Study

Lahav edited and compiled a collection of essays surrounding the freedom of the press in developed and emerging countries. The essays in the collection present three legal models regulating the press: "the Anglo-American approach," "the Continental approach," and "the non-Western approach." In addition to editing the book, Lahav authored a chapter analyzing the freedom of the press in Israel in 1985, when the book was published.

Journal issues

Law and the Transformation of Israeli Society

Lahav served as a co-editor for this 1998 journal issue highlighting interdisciplinary scholarship on "Israeli history, politics, society, and culture." Notable articles described Israel's Supreme Court, constitutional law, labor law, and the legal reform of laws concerning violence against women. The issue was sponsored by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, in affiliation with the Association for Israel Studies. Lahav's "Guest Editor's Introduction," at the beginning of the issue argued that Israel's legal history cannot be interpreted in a linear fashion, and noted the important role "sociological jurisprudence" and legal "realism" play in Israeli law.

Book chapters

• 'American Moments[s]: When, How, and Why Did Israeli Law Faculties Come to Resemble Elite U.S. Law Schools?' in American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories (Bartie and Sandomierski, eds., 2021).
• "The Woes of WoW: The Women of the Wall as a Religious Social Movement and as a Metaphor," in Women's Rights and Religious Law (Fareda Banda & Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, eds., Routledge, 2016).
• "Seeking Recognition: Women's Struggle for Full Citizenship in the Community of Religious Worship," in Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities (H. Herzog & A. Braude, eds., Palgrave, 2009).

Articles

Lahav has written nearly 50 articles, including:

• "'A Great Episode in the History of Jewish Womanhood': Golda Meir, the Women Workers' Council, Pioneer Women, and the Struggle for Gender Equality," 23 Israel Studies 1 (2018).
• Zivotofsky v. Kerry: The Supreme Court of the United States, the Politics of American Jewry and the Biblical Balaam," 21 Israel Studies 1 (2016).
• "The Suez Crisis of 1956 and Its Aftermath: A Comparative Study of Constitutions, Use of Force, Diplomacy and International Relations," 95 Boston University Law Review 1297 (2015).
• "The Women of the Wall: A Metaphor for National and Religious Identity," 30 Israel Studies Review 50 (2015).
• "The Women of the Wall: American Jewish and Israeli Feminism,"  Sh'ma Journal 5 (Oct 2013).
• "History in Journalism and Journalism in History: Anthony Lewis and the Watergate Crisis," 29 Journal of Supreme Court History 163 (2004).
• "Archetypal Trials and the Management of Dissent: Some Insights from Marketing Theory," 4 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 763 (2003).
• "Facing Occupation: The Relevance of the American History of Slavery to Israel," 16 Bar Ilan Law Studies 561 (2003).
• "A Barrel without Hoops: The Impact of Counterterrorism on Israel's Legal Culture," 10 Cardozo Law Review, 529 (December 1988).
• "Holmes and Brandeis: Libertarian and Republican Justifications for Free Speech", 4 Journal of Law & Politics 451 (Winter 1988).
• "American Influence on Israel's Jurisprudence of Free Speech", 9 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 21 (Fall 1981).

Honors

• Lifetime Achievement Award in Israel Studies (2017) from The Association of Israel Studies
• Seltner Prize (1998): Awarded annually for excellence in legal research by the Seltner Foundation and Tel Aviv University

See also

• Israel law
• Freedom of Speech

References

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