Menachem Mautner, LAW AND THE CULTURE OF ISRAEL Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2011. x + 267 pp. ISBN 9780199600564. £34.95.
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2012.0088 |
| Author | Adam Hofri-Winogradow |
| Date | 01 January 2012 |
| Published date | 01 January 2012 |
| Pages | 125-126 |
Menachem Mautner is a pivotal figure in the history of the Israeli legal academy: long a popular contracts scholar and teacher, Mautner has since the early 1990s gradually transformed himself into a leading socio-legal theorist. Mautner's personal transformation is emblematic of a larger paradigm shift in Israeli legal academia, from formalist, doctrinal legal studies, which were the leading idiom of juristic study for decades and, until the 1990s, to the study of law – both in books and in action – by way of economics, history and various social sciences, which has increasingly become the new leading idiom of Israeli legal studies. Mautner's 1992 book,
Mautner's current book,
The legal history of the Zionist project, as Mautner tells it, can be briefly put as follows. Early 20th Century efforts at developing, out of traditional Jewish law, a modernized “Hebrew law” which could stand beside the revived Hebrew language, Hebrew literature and the Hebrew political, territorial entity (not to mention the Hebrew University, Hebrew postal service and so on) have failed. Most of Mandate Palestine's jurists preferred adopting the legal culture of their British masters to the uncertainties of “Hebrew law”. This adoption injected the liberal ideas inherent in the Common Law into Palestinian, and later...
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