Is There a "Legal Turn" in Jewish Philosophy?

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Philosophical and theoretical work in Jewish Studies increasingly takes special note of Jewish legal traditions, and the notion of law in general. While such work might build on the traditional study of halakha, it also draws on other conceptual resources and methods to ask new questions about the importance of law, or legal reasoning. Meanwhile, rabbinics scholars are asking questions that lend themselves to a dialogue with philosophy, by examining forms of legal reasoning, or by reflecting on implications of their own methodologies. What is the significance of those converging and intersecting engagements with legal traditions and law? What is the place and potential of the study of law in Jewish studies? How is university-level Jewish studies facilitating this sort of study?

Panelists are:

Paul Franks, whose current project traces transformations of the idea of Torah after the revocation of Jewish judicial autonomy in Jewish legal texts, modern (Jewish and general) philosophical works, and contemporary legal theory.

Vivian Liska, who is interrogating the concept of law, including its relation to narrative/aggada, in Kafka, Benjamin, Scholem, Arendt, and Derrida, as well as the challenges posed to law by the “Paulinian turn” of Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek, and by a “Talmudic turn” in contemporary scholarship.

Randi Rashkover, whose current work pursues the “inferential” logic deployed in halakhic reasoning as a promising departure from the deductive (‘rule-oriented’) logic that has prevailed in modern Jewish thought.

Yonatan Brafman, who is applying the broad methodologies of legal philosophy to works by three influential Jewish thinkers who made law the center of their thought: Leibowitz, Soloveitchik, and Berkovits; and whose work responds to the “ambiguities” of the Israeli field of “philosophy of halakha.”

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, a rabbinics scholar interested in reconstructing the activities of legal reasoning that lie behind and are engendered by performance of mishnaic tradition—a topic she pursues in Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism (2013).

The moderator, Dana Hollander, is completing a study of Hermann Cohen’s theory of “ethics out of law,” including its relation to rabbinic law and to German legal institutions and legal theory.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Thought and Theology

Moderator

• Dana Hollander, McMaster University

Discussants

• Paul W. Franks, Yale University

• Vivian Liska, Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp

• Randi Lynn Rashkover, George Mason University

• Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, University of Virginia

• Yonatan Yisrael Brafman, Princeton University