Professor Ruth Gavison is a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Israel Democracy Institute. 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.
Professor Gavison received an LLB, an LLM and a BA in Philosophy and Economics from the Hebrew University, and her doctorate in Legal Philosophy from Oxford. A Visiting Professor at Yale Law School from 1978 to 1980 and the USC Law Center from 1990 to 1992, she teaches legal theory and human rights in the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1998-1999 she was Laurance Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. In addition, she was a Haim H. Cohn Professor of Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Professor Gavison was a founding member of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) where she served for many years as Chairperson and as President from 1996 to 1999. Professor Gavison is currently a member of the International Commission of Jurists.
In 1997 Professor Gavison received the Zeltner prize for excellence in research. In the years 1999-2001 she was involved in compelling dialogue with Rabbi Yaacov Medan, which generated a draft of a covenant between religious and secular Jews in Israel. The covenant gained recognition and won many awards. In 2003 she won the Emet Prize for Law and Political Science, awarded to her by the Prime Minister of Israel.
She is a member of the Presidium of Moetzet Yahad: a national body working on building consensus between religious and secular Jews in Israel. Professor Gavison also holds an advisory board position with Privacy International.
Her many publications include: "Constitutions and Political Reconstruction? Israel’s Quest for a Constitution", International Sociology 18(1), pp. 55-73, 2003; (With M. Kremnitzer and Y. Dotan) Judicial Activism For and Against: The Role of The Supreme Court in Israeli Society , Magnes Press 2000 (Hebrew); (With Issam Abu-Riya) The Jewish-Arab Rift in Israel: Characteristics and Challenges, IDI, 1999; The Constitutional Revolution: Reality or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?, IDI, 1998.
Publications about the Gavison-Medan Compact include: Yoav Artsieli, Main Points and Principles of the Gavison-Medan Covenant, IDI and Avi Chai Foundation, 2004 and Uri Dromi (ed.), Brethren Dwelling Together: Orthodoxy and Non-Orthodoxy in Israel Positions, Propositions and Accords, IDI, 2005 (Hebrew).