Professor Ruth Gavison

Hebrew University law professor Ruth Gavison served as a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute from 1995-2003. Her areas of research include ethnic conflict, the protection of minorities, human rights, political theory, judiciary law, religion and politics, and Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. As part of her work at IDI, Prof. Gavison headed a Jewish-Arab dialogue group (1999-2001) and a working group on social and economic tensions in Israel (2000-2002).

Professor Gavison received a BA in Philosophy and Economics, an LLB, and an LLM from the Hebrew University, and a D.Phil in Legal Philosophy from Oxford University. The Haim Cohn Professor of Human Rights, she taught legal theory and human rights at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until her retirement in 2010. Prof Gavison was a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School (1978-1980) and at the University of Southern California Law Center (1990-1992), and was a Laurance Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University (1998-1999).

In 1999-2001, Prof. Gavison was involved in compelling dialogue with Rabbi Yaacov Medan, which generated a draft of The Gavison-Medan Covenant, a comprehensive proposal for dealing with issues of religion and state in Israel. A summary of this covenant can be found on this site in Main Points and Principles of the Gavison-Medan Covenant by Yoav Artsieli, which was published by IDI and the Avi Chai Foundation in 2004.

Professor Gavison was a founding member of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) where she served as President from 1996 to 1999 and as Chairperson for many years. In 2005, she founded the Mezilah Center, which aims to address the growing tendency among Israelis and Jews worldwide to question the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism and its compatibility with universal values.

Prof. Gavison served on numerous public committees and state commissions of inquiry. While she was at IDI, she served as a member of the Shamgar Committee on the Appointment of the Attorney-General. Most recently, she was a member of the Winograd Commission, which investigated the failures of the Second Lebanon War (2003-2006).

Professor Gavison received the Zeltner prize for excellence in research (1997), The Avi Chai Prize (2000, with Rabbi Medan), the Jerusalem Toleration Prize (2002), and the E.M.E.T. Prize for Law and Political Science (2003). In March 2011, it was announced that Prof. Gavison would be receiving the 2011 Israel Prize for legal research. The prize committee commended her research, which deals with issues at the core of Israel's constitutional law, and lauded her for her for grappling "exhaustively and courageously with forming Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state."

Publications by Prof. Gavison include: