What & Why
We establish and advance Jewish Legal Studies through three core pillars:
Scholarship Education Israel Engagement
The global rise of antisemitism and antizionism has exposed a critical gap in legal scholarship and policy.
CJLS fills that gap.
Activists and scholars in academia have developed sophisticated frameworks that distort Jewish identity, history, and peoplehood. Yet legal scholars have not developed a sufficiently robust body of scholarship grounded in Jewish history and experience to interrogate these frameworks, correct their distortions, and explain how contemporary antisemitism operates through law and legal institutions.
The result is a serious imbalance in academic and legal discourse. Misleading and false narratives about Jews, Zionism, and Israel increasingly shape the frameworks through which courts, lawyers, policymakers, and universities understand discrimination against Jews.
The consequences are not merely academic. They are legal.
In the recent First Circuit case StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice v. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2025), for example, the court dismissed claims arising from alleged antisemitic harassment while observing that there is “no consensus” regarding the relationship between antizionism and antisemitism. The case illustrates why rigorous legal scholarship examining Jewish identity, Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and contemporary antisemitism matters—and what can happen when that scholarship is absent.
This moment demands Jewish Legal Studies.
Jewish Legal Studies develops the research, theories, and analytical frameworks necessary to understand the intersections of law and Jewish peoplehood—and to recognize and address contemporary manifestations of antisemitism and discrimination against Jews.
Jewish organizations across the country are doing extraordinary work confronting antisemitism through strategic litigation, advocacy, education, and public policy. But those efforts depend upon something more foundational: a body of serious legal scholarship capable of shaping how lawyers, judges, scholars, policymakers, and future generations of legal professionals understand Jews, Jewish identity, and Jewish civil rights.
That is the work of CJLS.
We are building the scholarly infrastructure of Jewish Legal Studies so that:
Academics have rigorous frameworks for studying the intersections of law and Jewish identity, history, and peoplehood;
Attorneys have the legal theories, research, and strategies necessary to challenge antisemitism and defend Jewish civil rights;
Judges have the intellectual and doctrinal frameworks necessary to recognize antisemitism and anti-Jewish discrimination in their contemporary forms;
Policymakers have principled, research-based foundations for laws and policies that safeguard Jews, both individually and collectively; and
Law students learn to recognize unlawful discrimination and bias against Jews and develop the tools necessary to protect Jewish civil rights.
CJLS does not duplicate the work of existing Jewish advocacy organizations. We build the intellectual and scholarly foundation that makes that work stronger.
Through scholarship, education, and Israel engagement, CJLS is establishing Jewish Legal Studies as a field—and ensuring that Jewish history, identity, and peoplehood are understood on their own terms within legal scholarship and law.