Nir Kedar is a Professor of law and history at Bar Ilan University, Israel and the Vice President for Academic Affairs of Sapir College in Israel. His main fields of interest are modern legal history, legal and political theory and comparative law. He has published five books and numerous articles including, Mamlakhtiyut: David Ben-Gurion's Civic Thought (Hebrew) (2009), which won the 2009 Shapiro Prize for Best Book on Israel.
Introduction: law as an expression of Jewish culture; Part I. Seeking to
Fashion National Law: 1. Law and culture in early Zionist literature; 2.
The Hebrew peace courts: the Yishuv judicial system that failed; 3. The
Hebrew law society: an abortive attempt to fashion a Jewish-Hebrew national
code of law; 4. Why a Jewish-Hebrew system of law was not instituted at
independence; 5. A Hebrew constitution for the Jewish state: how did the
cultural dispute prevent the promulgation of a written constitution; 6.
Jewish law and legislation in Israel; Part II. The Resurgence of Cultural
Conflict: 7. Jewish heritage and a Jewish democratic state: the identity
discourse returns to the legal debate; 8. The identity turn and the Jewish
and democratic state; Part III. Zionism, Democracy, Law, and Culture: 9.
Zionism: making and preserving Hebrew culture; 10. Israeli law as a lieu de
mémoire of national identity and culture; Conclusion: list of legal cases.
