Jewish Legal Studies (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 purpose and 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.

1. Collective Identity Matters in Law. Legal systems routinely recognize group-based identities—gender, race, disability, indigeneity, nationality. Jewish peoplehood belongs within this analytic frame and cannot be coherently addressed through religion-only or individualist paradigms.

2. Jew-hatred Is a Legal Problem, Not Merely a Social One. Antisemitism operates through law as well as outside it—through doctrinal gaps, misclassifications, and failures of enforcement. Understanding its legal dimensions is essential to ensuring Jewish equality.

3. History and Structure Shape Doctrine. Jewish legal vulnerability cannot be understood apart from the long history of diaspora, exclusion, conditional tolerance, and contested sovereignty. Legal analysis that ignores this history risks reproducing the very harms it purports to remedy.

1. Jewish People (Foundational Subject)

2. Law as a Site of Collective Recognition and Misrecognition

3. Jew-hatred as a Legal Phenomenon

4. Zionism and Jewish Peoplehood

5. Legal Definitions of Antisemitism

6. Institutional Responsibility and Structural Reform

7. Education and Professional Formation

8. Intersectional and Structural Analysis

9. Deconstructing anti-Jewish Lawfare

Jewish Legal Studies (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 (Jewish Peoplehood and Law) is an area of legal inquiry that examines how Jews, understood as a people with collective identity, history, and continuity, are constituted, regulated, protected, and constrained by legal systems—religious, domestic, and international—across time and place.

Like Feminist Legal Studies, this field rejects the assumption that law is neutral with respect to identity. Like Race and the Law, it interrogates how formal equality can coexist with structural exclusion and how intent-based doctrines fail to capture group-based harm. Like Disability Studies, it examines how legal systems pathologize, ignore, or accommodate difference. Like Indian Law, it grapples with the legal implications of peoplehood, sovereignty, diaspora, and self-determination. And like Animal Law, it challenges deeply entrenched assumptions about who counts as a rights-bearing subject within legal regimes.

1. Collective Identity Matters in Law. Legal systems routinely recognize group-based identities—gender, race, disability, indigeneity, nationality. Jewish peoplehood belongs within this analytic frame and cannot be coherently addressed through religion-only or individualist paradigms.

2. Jew-hatred Is a Legal Problem, Not Merely a Social One. Antisemitism operates through law as well as outside it—through doctrinal gaps, misclassifications, and failures of enforcement. Understanding its legal dimensions is essential to ensuring Jewish equality.

3. History and Structure Shape Doctrine. Jewish legal vulnerability cannot be understood apart from the long history of diaspora, exclusion, conditional tolerance, and contested sovereignty. Legal analysis that ignores this history risks reproducing the very harms it purports to remedy.