Jewish Legal Studies Manifesto

Jewish Legal Studies (Jewish Peoplehood and Law) is a field of legal inquiry grounded in a simple but long-overlooked premise: that Jews constitute a people, and that law has played a central role in shaping, regulating, protecting, and endangering Jewish existence, both individually and collectively. Like other identity-centered and group-based areas of legal study, this field begins from the recognition that ostensibly neutral legal frameworks often fail to apprehend the lived realities, structural vulnerabilities, and collective dimensions of particular groups.

Jewish Legal Studies is analogous in method to Feminist Legal Studies, Race and the Law, Disability Studies, Indian Law, and Animal Law. Each of these fields emerged in response to the realization that prevailing legal doctrines—developed around abstract, universalized subjects—systematically obscured the ways law distributes power, recognition, and harm along group-based lines. Each insists that rigorous legal analysis requires attention to identity, history, structure, and social meaning.

So too with Jews.

For much of modern legal thought, Jews have been misclassified, reduced, or rendered doctrinally invisible—treated solely as a religious group, a set of individual believers, or a political constituency, rather than as a people with collective identity, shared history, and common fate. This misapprehension has produced persistent legal blind spots: in antidiscrimination law, in constitutional doctrine, in international law, and in contemporary disputes over speech, equality, and academic freedom. Worse, law is often intentionally weaponized against Jews as a collective. Jewish Legal Studies arises to confront and correct both the blind spots and the anti-Jewish lawfare.