Legal Theory

I'm delighted to report that Professor Ernie Weinrib has been elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science.  The American Academy of Arts & Sciences is one of the United State's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers.   The current membership includes some 200 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.  This election is a fitting tribute to Ernie's foundational work in legal theory and the incredible impact his scholarship has made on the world.  Please join me in congratulating Ernie on this outstanding accomplishment.

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Prof. Ran Hirschl has published a new book, Constitutional Theocracy (Harvard University Press, 2010).

• Publisher's web page

From the publisher:

At the intersection of two sweeping global trends - the rise of popular support for principles of theocratic governance, and the spread of constitutionalism and judicial review - a new legal order has emerged: constitutional theocracy. It enshrines religion and its interlocutors as "a" or "the" source of legislation, and at the same time adheres to core ideals and practices of modern constitutionalism. A unique hybrid of apparently conflicting worldviews, values, and interests, constitutional theocracies thus offer an ideal setting-a "living laboratory" as it were-for studying constitutional law as a form of politics by other means. In this book, Ran Hirschl combines insights from legal theory, economics, theology, and political sociology with a rigorous comparative analysis of religion-and-state jurisprudence from dozens of countries worldwide to explore the evolving role of constitutional law and courts in a non-secularist world.