The goal of our research group is to examine the historical process by which common law has spread around the globe. English law and the legal systems that arose from these systems, primarily American law, have enjoyed immense success in conquering the world. Our group seeks to understand the factors assisting and inhibiting common law transplantation in the distant and more recent past. We will do so by bringing into sharp focus two specific historical examples of common legal law transplantation, to compare them to gain a better understanding of the process that we will examine. The two examples are the United States and Israel. Both countries provide instructive examples of common law transplantations, its successes and problems.

 

Our research group will explore the following topics:

• The religious aspects of legal systems.
• Conceptions of secularism, the specificity of Indian secularism, and the extent to which secularism might be considered a Western, Christian doctrine.
• Global justice, and caution in the attempts to extend the principles of distributive justice to the global sphere.
• Establishing universal features of criminal law that would be applied in the International Criminal Court and other international tribunals.
• Issues of political import and relevance to Israeli society.
• The relations between values and rights in the constitutional context.
• An analysis of the later drafts of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, drafted over the months April and May of 1948.