Past Symposia, Workshops & Forums
Wed, December 25, 2014, 18:00-20:00
The Berg Institute will host Dr. Tatiana Borisova from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg for a lecture, titled: History of Firearms Private Possession in Russia: What a Preliminary Comparison with the US Can Tell Us. Dr. Borisova is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute. The event will take place at the Sonia Kossoy Conference Room (307), on the 3rd floor of the Faculty of Law Trubowicz Building.
The 2nd Annual TAU Workshop for Junior Scholars: Law Between Normativity and Pragmatism
Mon-Tue, November 10-11, 2014
The Berg Institute for Law and History will host along with other Research Institutes and Centers at the Buchmann Faculty of Law an international workshop dedicated to discussing current legal issues and policies.
The event, which will be carried out in a panel-based setting, will feature guest speakers from Germany, US, Brazil, Canada and more. Various Faculty members will provide commentaries.
In addition, a special panel will be devoted to law and history (Tuesday, 13:10-14:50), and will include talks by prominent legal historians from both Israel and abroad.
All sessions will take place at the Faculty's Trubowicz Building, Sonia Kossoy Conference Room (Room 307).
Guest Speaker: Dr. Simon Rabinovitch, E Pluribus Unum? Jews and the Persistence of Collective Rights
Sun, November 9, 2014, 18:00-20:00
The Berg Institute will host a talk by Simon Rabinovitch on his current research project: "E Pluribus Unum? Jews and the Persistence of Collective Rights". Prof. Rabinovitch is the Peter T. Paul Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Department of History at Boston University, and his work examines Jewish politics in revolutionary Russia, Jewish nationalist thought, and Jewish folkloristic theory and ethnography. The talk will take place at the Sonia Kossoy Conference Room (307) in the Faculty of Law Trubowicz Building.
The 10th Annual Israeli History & Law Association Conference
Mon, October 20, 2014
The Buchmann Faculty of Law's David Berg Institute for Law and History will co-host the Israeli History & Law Association's 10th annual conference, scheduled to take place Monday, October 20th, 2014 at the Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. The five-session conference will focus on "The Historical Aspects of Courts and Tribunals Judiciary" and will include talks by top Israeli historians and academics working in the field of legal history.
Conference: Sovereignty as Trusteeship for Humanity: Historical Antecedents and Their Impact on International Law
Mon-Tue, June 16-17, 2014
The conference, which was organized by The David Berg Institute, GlobalTrust Research Project and The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, brought together political theorists, lawyers and historians to explore the historical context of the emergence of the debate over the meaning of sovereignty and its contours: When, by whom and why were such competing accounts of sovereignty developed? How could their analysis enrich our understanding of the history of the concept? And whether such unraveling raises a more nuanced account of what sovereignty meant and what it may mean for us today? Such exploration may address alternative perspectives and interpretations and examine the relationships between the different approaches to sovereignty, relations with the private law concept of property and further explore the influences of these ideas on general international law and some of its specific legal doctrines.
Webcasts of the conference are available here.
Symposium on How Zionism Became Racism: International Law, Anti-Semitism and Jewish Lawyering at the United Nations, 1945-1975
Wed, March 12, 2014
The symposium, which was part of the Faculty of Law's Forum on Law, Globalization and the Transnational Sphere, discussed the contribution of Jewish lawyers and organizations to the creation of an international human‐rights discourse in the 1950s and 1960s, and the later history of this contribution, as human rights discourse was transformed into a weapon to be used against the Jewish state beginning in the 1970s. The symposium's guest-speaker was Prof. James Loeffler form the University of Virginia's Department of History.
Book Symposium: Michael A. Livingston, The Fascists and the Jews of Italy: Mussolini's Race Laws, 1938-1943
Wed, March 12, 2014
The symposium marked the publication of Michal A. Livingston's (Rutgers University School of Law) comprehensive analysis of the Race Laws in Italy, from 1938 until 1943, before the German occupation. Commentators and critics included: Dr. Ely Aharonson (University of Haifa Faculty of Law), Dr. Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Romance and Latin American Studies) and Dr. Adam Hofri‐Winogradow (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law). Prof. Livingston responded to critiques.
Conference on Identities and Schisms in Mandatory and Israeli Society: Legal and Historical Aspects
Tue, March 4, 2014
This was the third annual conference designed to bring together Israeli legal and general historians to demonstrate how legal history can contribute to the study of the country’s political, social and economic history. The conference was organized by the David Berg Institute in collaboration with the Tel Aviv University Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel and hosted by the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Humanities. The conference included four schisms: Holocaust survivors and veteran Israelis; religious and secular Jews; Israeli men and women; and European and Middle Eastern Jews/Arabs.
Event Invitation in Hebrew (PDF).
Symposium on the Changing Laws of Circumcision in Judaism and Islam (Historical Perspectives on Current Events)
Mon, February 24, 2014
The topic-based symposium was devoted to the comparative history of the attitudes of Jewish and Islamic law to male circumcision, a subject whose history is of great scholarly as well as contemporary interest. Speakers at the symposium included: Dr. Lena Salaymeh, a Robbins Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law and Prof. Eli Melech Westreich, from the TAU Faculty of Law.
Joint Tour to the Tax Museum in Jerusalem
Wed, February 12, 2014
The special tour was the first joint-activity of the Israeli Economic History and Law and History Associations. Participating members came from different disciplines, yet as they share many common research interests, the tour was part of an effort to foster collaborations on these joint areas of interest.
