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Judicial power and national politics in Israel : religious-secular conflict -- Women's movement mobilization -- The irony of State incorporation -- Cause lawyers and judicial community -- A new high court mission -- Social movements and changing language of the court

In the Israeli case, judicial empowerment has come primarily through judicial initiative rather than emerging from majoritarian institutions or strategic considerations relating to electoral politics. Justices with deep commitments to political-liberal rights engaged in a decades-long process of entrenching a political-liberal rights regime through jurisprudence. At the heart of this sea change in Israeli politics was a shift in ideas.

The traditional and most common conception of cause lawyers has viewed them as necessarily oppositional to the state, leftist, and, at best, transgressive. This conception is significant to our analysis because of its tendency to treat 'the state' as a rather singular arena of power - an 'it' - rather than a multi-dimensional entity made up of competing institutions and personnel. Following work on the disaggregated and embedded state, we suggest that conflict and competition among state institutions and state personnel allow cause lawyers and state actors to engage in mutually-beneficial action in service of their agendas. Litigation has important benefits for both cause lawyers and state actors: within the arena of law, processes that usually require the backing of large constituencies in the context of majoritarian institutions require, instead, convincing legal arguments. We briefly present evidence from two highly disparate cases of similar processes of interaction among cause lawyers and state actors in Vermont and Israel, which we believe indicates that this type of interaction is far from idiosyncratic. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier Ltd.]

Introduction: can we even speak of "Judaism and law"? / Christine Hayes -- Law in biblical Israel / Chaya Halberstam -- Law in Jewish society of the second temple period / Seth Schwartz -- Law in classical rabbinic Judaism / Christine Hayes -- Approaches to foreign law in biblical Israel and classical Judaism through the medieval period / Beth Berkowitz, Barnard College -- Law in medieval Judaism / Warren Zev Harvey -- From enlightenment to emancipation / Verena Kasper-Marienberg -- Enlightenment conceptions of Judaism and law / Eliyahu Stern -- Rethinking Halakhah in modern Eastern Europe : mysticism, antinomianism, positivism / Menachem Lorberbaum -- Antinomianism and its responses : 19th century / David Ellenson -- New developments in modern Jewish thought : from theology to law and ack again / Yonatan Brafman -- Judaism, Jewish law in pre-state Palestine / Amihai Radzyner -- Judaism, Jewish law and the Jewish state in Israel / Arye Edrei -- What does it mean for a state to be Jewish? / Daphne Barak Erez -- Fault lines / Patricia J. Woods