Bernard Jackson

Despite the efforts of some modern Jewish law scholars, it is difficult to apply models of secular jurisprudence (whether positivist or Dworkinian) to the Jewish legal system. Internal analysis suggests that the “secondary rules” of the system are far too fragile. Rather, the system appears to privilege trust over objectively determinable truth. (But perhaps trust is a concept to which greater attention should be paid also in secular jurisprudence, as a legal realism informed by semiotics might maintain.) The practical implications of this difference are here illustrated both from research on reform of Jewish marriage law and recent developments in the area of law and religion, in the wake of Archbishop Rowan Williams’ advocacy in 2008 of a model of “transformative accommodation”.

In this article, I explore some facets of the roles of legal philosophy on the one hand, theology on the other, in the construction of a theory of Jewish Law (halakhah). I commence with three issues arising primarily from the use of legal philosophy as a model for the construction of a theory of halakhah: (A) the authority system, viewed in terms of a theory of sources; (B) the relationship between law and morality; (C) the judicial role. I then turn to the theological model, noting from the start the conceptual issue of the nature of ‘religious law’ as conceived in the Jewish tradition. Downloadable from downloadable from http://jewishlawassociation.org/resources.htm