The Process Is the Reward

About a decade ago we had an interesting conversation at a faculty meeting about some professors’ policy of banning laptops in class. They argued that the students absorbed the material better and were more engaged.

I was hesitant to implement something like this, not only because I was transitioning to an electronic casebook, but because, as an English-as-a-third-language speaker I am aware of how slowly I write compared to my typing speed. I assumed (correctly) that people would want to take notes in class, and that handwriting would slow them down.

Then, I decided to experiment on myself. I had to attend a conference and decided to try both note-taking styles. Each day included talks that were of comparable professional interest to me. The first day, I wrote notes by hand. The second day I typed. A week later, I remembered plenty from the first day and absolutely nothing from the second.

Despite my <groan> “lived experience” </groan> I decided not to ban laptops in class. I shared the results of my experiment with my students, and while some decided to try taking notes by hand, most kept their laptops. But the whole thing taught me something valuable about the process of learning. Plenty of psychological and educational research confirms this: when note-taking by hand, people carefully consider the material rather than type it unprocessed, which improves recall, even if the end product is less pretty.

Two recent experiences made me think about this. First, I got to read this piece, which is a Jeremiad about what AI has done to postsecondary education (I agree, which is why I will no longer teach paper-based seminars). What was most interesting about the piece, however, was the author’s effort to explain why it was that students recurred to AI to cheat. Sure, it’s easy, and people panic and procrastinate, and all the usual answers. But there’s something else going on:

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick writes, “Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in the tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.” Nozick asks whether you would plug into such a machine for life, with all your experiences no more than preprogrammed illusions. Hedonists would surely reply, “heck yes, the sooner the better!”

Nozick was anti-hedonism. He argued that as appealing as the experience machine initially seems, we would not want to spend our lives attached to it. There are two key reasons why: first, we want to do things with our lives, to accomplish things. It is not merely the artificial feeling of accomplishment that we crave, but the actual fact of it, the truth that we have done something with our time in the world. It is better to write the Great American Novel than just have the false conviction that you have written it, it is better to be loved and have real friendships than buy the machine’s lie otherwise.

Second, the experience machine not only strips us of a connection to real accomplishment, but prevents us from becoming authentic persons. Are you courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving, generous? Plugged into the experience machine of phony pleasures, you aren’t anything. Instead, you are simply a passive blob, a receptacle of pleasurable (but fraudulent) sensations. If you prefer to do and have done things and to become a real and genuine person, then you should reject the allure of the experience machine.

That’s Nozick’s argument. Nozick is wrong. AI is the birth of the experience machine, and students prefer it. That’s why they cheat.

Writing is not a tool to express our thoughts—the act of writing is the act of thinking. Sitting down and making words, pondering not merely le mot juste, but how the argument works, what metaphors are appropriate, what really is the conclusion you want to reach, that is the creation of your own point of view. A sophomore telling ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to write a critique of euthanasia is not developing her own ideas about euthanasia. But it does give the illusion.

Finally, having cheated all the way through college, letting AI do the work, students can have the feeling of accomplishment walking across the stage at graduation, pretending to be an educated person with skills and knowledge that the machines actually have. Pretending to have earned a degree. If Nozick were right then AI would not lead to an explosion of cheating, because students would want the knowledge and understanding that college aims to provide. But in fact many just want the credential. They are hedonists abjuring the development of the self and the forging of their own souls.

This is depressing, and it confirmed something I experienced a couple of years ago when I taught pre-law undergrads across the bridge. It was an online class, and I prepared a lot of interactive assignments in small groups, but very quickly it turned out that the class would not work as planned. Students would return from breakout rooms and report that everyone else in the group was nothing more than a black, unresponsive rectangle, and they couldn’t discuss the assignment. Defeated and disappointed, I had to revert to straight lecturing, which is my least preferred method of conveying information online, because otherwise the few folks that tried to be engaged would just face endless frustration. What the heck? I thought. If they’re not in class, why did they log on? And if they logged on, why won’t they participate? Some of this classroom dysfunction was demystified on December 26th when, to my surprise, I received an email notifying that “Melany’s OtterPilot Has Joined Your Meeting.” It was our regular class time, but of course it was the day after Christmas and the semester had ended weeks prior. When I logged on out of curiosity, a black rectangle representing the student was there. I turned on my camera and said “well, hello there,” and the rectangle disappeared. As per an Internet search, OtterPilot is an AI service that attends virtual classes for you and summarizes them. If it was in wide use throughout the semester and I spent four months lecturing to dozens of bots, it would explain not only the scant participation during online lecture, but also the the lackluster performance and milquetoast answers on the final.

I’m not a megalomaniac and I’m sure my class wasn’t the single most scintillating experience on the planet. But what could 160 19-year-olds have going on on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9:30 that was so much better than talking with their friends about jury selection and murder cases and ethical dilemmas about crime–topics that interested them enough to pick the course as an elective? What was so much better on the phone or on the screen during those particular 100 minutes? Wasn’t it a shame that they missed out?

Anyway, now that I’m a student myself again, it’s been interesting to see how my colleagues–highly accomplished second-career folks who are studying something they are passionate about enough to burden themselves with a rigorous program on top of full-time jobs and families–are taking to the panoply of AI tools, which was not around last time when they were at the grad school rodeo. Folks are having their otters and other AI rodents take notes during class and sharing them. I take my notes myself, so I have some basis for comparison. The AI captures some of what happens in class, but when I read it, it seems very removed from the class I attended. Had I not paid attention and taken notes, I would have absorbed nothing from the AI summary. When we have an assignment, hefty as it is, I don’t freak out because the material, which I summarized by hand, is fresh in my head–I don’t need to reconstruct it from disembodied notes.

On the other end of the spectrum is the second experience: my awesome drums class (easily the best two hours of my week outside of family time). I learn drums in a group of marvelous people, in person, from an in-person teacher, not from an app. Everything is very immediate, very hands-on, and very conducive to learning. As someone with a more than decent sense of rhythm and plenty of experience playing instruments in bands and ensembles, I expected drumming to become rewarding more quickly (imagine, as a woodwind player, skipping the long months you spend just working on getting a decent sound out of your instrument! Hit the drum and it plays!). To some degree it’s true. But it does turn out that mastering drumming skills is a multi-step process, and after doing this for about a year, I can distinguish them. Step one, which is usually not an issue for me, comes being able to comprehend and absorb the pattern in your head. Step two is translating what’s in your mind to your hands and legs, i.e., to get it in your body. And step three is the physical ability to perform the pattern (e.g., how fast can one kick the kick drum, how accurately you can play 16ths on the hat and the snare, can you time the hat foot with the kick foot). Now that we’re playing patterns that disconnect the kick foot from the dominant hand hitting the hi-hat, things take a bit longer to digest, and we all spent several weeks “in the soup”, as it were, clumsily trying to separate foot from hand. It was a very physical sense of plateau in step 2. At some point, I felt that I got over that, and then realized, to my dismay, that even as the mind is strong, the flesh is weak: quads were cramping, forearms were hurting, etc. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I had a transcendent sense that we all, one way or another, got over the step 3 hump and accomplished something. Folks, it was exhilarating. I’m sure there are more learning fits and starts in our future, but I can feel us getting better.

Even as I understand, cognitively, the allure of the experience machine, it makes me deeply sad that people don’t want to experience the profundity of the learning process. It’s so interesting and satisfying to see what your one and only brain can do, where it stumbles, how it overcomes, how shortcuts are assembled and dismantled, how neural pathways are forged and overwritten. What possible diploma or grade could be better than rewarding yourself with the experience of your own cognition, experiencing yourself as a full human, and seeing what you’re capable of?

When it’s over, like Mary Oliver, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. Don’t you?

What Fresh Heaven Is This?

We’re already on Page 56 and I realized that I haven’t provided a sufficient introduction to what I’m doing with this project, so here’s a belated introduction.

One of the most studied texts in the Jewish canon, and arguably the bread-and-butter of religious education in Jewish yeshivot, is the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli), a compendium of legal arguments, intertextual tapestries, storytelling, and much more, produced and redacted by Jewish scholars who lived throughout the Babylonian Empire, likely between the Third and Sixth Centuries, while the territory that we would today identify as Iraq was under Roman and then Sassanian governance. After the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, this became the prominent center of Jewish culture, which now had to pivot from Temple-centered worship to text and Torah interpretation.

The Hebrew Bible, as we know it today, is not one book, but many books, whose compilation, editing, and reduction took centuries. It consists of works of many genres and, save for a few notable examples, the dates of composition do not correspond to the dates depicted in the narrative. During the Second Temple days and beyond, Jewish sages known as the Tana’im interpreted the legal framework of some biblical books, producing rules and regulations (halakha) and also some stories (aggaddah). The resulting collection, the mishna, and some accompanying texts from the same era, the baraita and the tosefta, are widely believed to have coalesced around 200 AD (this is traditionally regarded as the life project of Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi). Later sages, notably Rav Ashi and Ravina but probably many others as well, compiled a work that includes the mishnaic content and the gemara, which consists of plenty of commentary, legal argument, further storytelling, and further intertextual creativity. The gemara reflects the work of several generation of sages: the Amoraim (4th, 5th century) and the Savoraim (6th century). The latter group are thought to have completed the final redaction of the text.

If you open a Talmud page today, you will typically find the original content in the middle: the mishna quote, in rabbinic Hebrew, followed by an account of logical, legal, and theological arguments, jokes, tragedies, and pretty much everything else, in rabbinic Aramaic. In the wide margins of the page you’ll find commentary from various Medieval, Renaissance, and sometimes modern exegetes and commentators, with the most prominent and famous commentary coming from Rashi and written in special script.

In the early 1920s, a new custom emerged: beyond the traditional study of this central text in religious yeshivot, there would be a worldwide schedule for studying the Talmud, assigning everyone interested, all around the world, a daf yomi (a page a day). Many religious institutions offer a lesson (shi’ur) on the daf of the day, and there is a proliferation of resources, including a plethora of podcasts and videos, dedicated to daf studies. Many of these promise to get you through the daf in 15 minutes a day and go over each and every logical twist, including some of the exegesis in the margins. If you follow through, you can expect to get through the full SHAS (an acronym for Shisha Sdarim, the six books of the Bavli) in approximately seven years.

My approach to this enterprise is a little bit different. I was raised in a secular Israeli home, with classical liberal values, and while there is a lot of perennial wisdom in the Talmud, there are plenty of things there that I don’t see much point in dragging, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Also, some pages are full of interesting content worth getting into in depth, while others are, from my perspective, duds. I also don’t believe in reading the daf just for the sake of getting through it, unless we get something out of it.

Here are some of the things that I look for: I think the Talmud is a phenomenal tool for developing logical, critical thinking. By following the different strands of argument and taking a steel-man approach to each, one can learn how to apply various forms of logic to any area of policymaking or opinion formation. One also learns how to fortify one’s argument through intertextual references, and different approaches for how texts can or should be read. I also think that the Talmud shows us that many of the questions we face today troubled our ancestors as well, and we can learn something from the constructs they used to approach these problems. It’s also a great education in how to support macro-level logic—rules with universal application—with anecdote, story, or metaphor. And, it’s a phenomenal education in viewpoint diversity, as very often the question is never settled and you’re left with respect for the various opinions expressed.

Anyway, those are the goals I have when I engage in daily Talmud study. Some days are longer and some are shorter; some are funny and some are sad or irate; sometimes I go to traditional sources and sometimes to literature, current events, musical works, or popular culture. Because what we find in the text mirrors what we look for, those of you who are regular readers can probably guess what tends to grab my interest: I’m a law professor who is also a second-career rabbinical student, and I’m especially interested in courtrooms, prisons, punishment theory, social movements, public debates, the value of art and artistry, and bits that are comical or quirky.

To make this more widely available and useful, I’m cross-posting these daf posts to a new Substack – I hope I’ll have the fortitude to get on with it, because after all, this is a very niche undertaking. For now, and probably forever, the subscriptions to that newsletter will be free, so you can follow along here or there.

I hope you find this useful and educational. So, buckle up, friends, it’s going to be a long and interesting ride.

Freedom of No Speech

You’ve probably heard about Ilya Shapiro’s fateful visit to my home institution last year, when my students shouted him off the stage because of his ill-conceived public posts about diversity in the judiciary. The incident, as I expected, played right into Shapiro’s hands, resulting in posts, public speaking engagements, and even a book. Anyway, we did some thinking about what our educational mission is and how exposure to diverse viewpoints improves our students’ lawyering skills, and invited Shapiro to come back to campus. This time, he was interviewed and listened to, and my terrific colleague Emily Murphy, the rightful recipient of our teaching award this year, with quiet logic and incisive questions, showed him for the unserious person that he is. It was a triumph of what free speech can accomplish that shouting cannot.

Shapiro might or might not have come to regret his silly tweets, but in today’s Free Press, Kat Rosenfield writes about how the pendulum has swung from shrill mob hit jobs on people because of things they posted in high school to venerating them for the vile things they spewed. She observes:

[O]ne of the worst things about the peak woke years was progressives’ insistence that not only should speech come with consequences, but that those consequences should be maximally punitive, with no possibility of redemption.

This led to an equal and opposite consensus among the MAGA folks that offensive internet posts should merit no consequences whatsoever, and perhaps should even be celebrated for triggering all the right people, which is to say, people on the left.

Which is fine, if you want to live in a world where the discourse is permanently dominated by shrieking authoritarians on one side and smirking edgelords on the other. In this world, the only difference between being an internet folk hero and being canceled to death is whether the current White House occupant is a Democrat or a Republican. It’s a world where we are all being driven slowly insane by perpetual exposure to the inner brainworkings of people who cannot tell the difference between a thought you should broadcast on the public internet versus one you should leave unexpressed—or at least keep confined to the relative privacy of a group chat.

I used to say in public talks that the right to say no to unwanted sexual conduct should also encompass the right to say yes. And I’ve come to believe that this two-way-street is true for speech, too: in the same way that the right to religion encompasses the freedom *from* religion, the right to speak also folds in the right to freedom *from* speech.

After years of punditry, etc., done in my area of expertise as an academic (including, as regular readers recall, almost daily TV spots during Trump’s first term), and thankfully without any major scandal or public degradation, I got pretty tired of hearing my own voice and of the deleterious effects on my life, and left social media (I left Twitter years ago, and left Facebook recently, and explained why here). The effect was prodigious – my quality of life improved manifold. It’s incredible to realize how little value the platforms offered me, how enriched my life is by freeing time for family, sports, music, academic obligations, and talmud study, how–slowly but surely–my cognitive capacity and concentration are returning, and how I can engage and be present for my students when I don’t have strangers’ bloviation clouding my mind. It’s amazing how clear I can be during meditation or prayer (hey, work of a lifetime, but noticeable progress). It’s amazing how absorbing arguments in a naturally paced manner allows me to control my temper, be more thoughtful, and respond in measure, sensible tones. True freedom.

I don’t know how I can convey to my students, who are in their early twenties, the wonderful gift of thinking your thoughts quietly to yourself and discussing them in person with your family and friends to the extent that you’re interested in doing so. Not just because of the public square ugliness, the fear of excoriation, etc., but because there is such beauty in the silence of having that thought rattle in your head, examined against evidence, and subjected to patient debate with people who care about you and about what you think.

I still make public appearances, but I’m pretty selective about who I talk to, how, and about what. I think my op-eds during the pandemic were important for changing a pretty destructive public tide. I gave them a lot of thought and put work into crafting them so that the message would make sense and find receptive minds. That’s the sort of thing I hope to cultivate in the second half of my professional life.

Postconviction Review: The Scarf-and-Horseback Edition (b.Sanhedrin 42b)

Welcome to a new blog feature, in which I chat about a cool, unusual, or edifying bit from the daf yomi. Originating in the 1920, “daf yomi” is a Jewish learning regimen for the Babylonian Talmud, in which every day Jews from all over the world learn the same page. The Daf Yomi webpage, Hebrew text resource Sefaria, and many other resources can point you to the day’s page. I don’t always love this method–it can lead to speeding through some interesting stuff while spending more time on things that are less exciting–but I do find it appealing to be on a general calendar of learning with the rest of the Jewish world, across diverse denominations, beliefs, orientations, values, and methods.

One of the things that I find most appealing about Talmudic study is a logical approach to perennial problems of justice and ethics, and today’s page is no different. The last few days’ worth of pages find us in Tractate Sanhedrin, which addresses various law, adjudication, procedure, and evidence problems, which are of course of special interest to me. Pages 41-42 are concerned with issues involving evidentiary contradictions, the value and weight of testimonies, and issues involving last-minute halting of executions.

Readers who find this material crass might be comforted with the reminder that the Bavli is not an accurate historical record of criminal proceedings. Writings from the Second Temple era confirm the existence of the Sanhedrin, a high court within the Hasmonean empire and beyond (seated as a “big” Sanhedrin of 71 or a “little” Sanhedrin of 23–election proceedings dissected in the early pages of the tractate), but the extent to which it regularly issued judgments of life and death are dubious. The Talmud itself refers to the rareness of executions (saying that a Sanhedrin that ordered executions once every seventy years would be regarded as hovlanit, trigger-happy). By the time the Babylonian Talmud coalesces, it has been centuries since an actual Sanhedrin was convened, so a lot of this stuff is best understood as using scriptural anchors to elaborate on legal logic, rather than as a description of proceedings before real tribunals.

Anyway, Sanhedrin 42b turns to issues of executions, describing matters as follows:

אֶחָד עוֹמֵד עַל פֶּתַח בֵּית דִּין, וְהַסּוּדָרִין בְּיָדוֹ, וְסוּס רָחוֹק מִמֶּנּוּ כְּדֵי שֶׁיְּהֵא רוֹאֵהוּ. אוֹמֵר אֶחָד: ״יֵשׁ לְלַמֵּד עָלָיו זְכוּת״, הַלָּה מֵנִיף בְּסוּדָרִין, וְהַסּוּס רָץ וּמַעֲמִידָן. וַאֲפִילּוּ הוּא אוֹמֵר: ״יֵשׁ לִי לְלַמֵּד עַל עַצְמִי זְכוּת״, מַחֲזִירִין אוֹתוֹ, אֲפִילּוּ אַרְבַּע וְחָמֵשׁ פְּעָמִים, וּבִלְבַד שֶׁיֵּשׁ מַמָּשׁ בִּדְבָרָיו.

One man stands at the entrance to the court, with cloths [vehasudarin] in his hand, and another man sits on a horse at a distance from him but where he can still see him. If one of the judges says: I can teach a reason to acquit him, the other, i.e., the man with the cloths, waves the cloths as a signal to the man on the horse, and the horse races off after the court agents who are leading the condemned man to his execution, and he stops them, and they wait until the court determines whether or not the argument has substance. And even if he, the condemned man himself, says: I can teach a reason to acquit myself, he is returned to the courthouse, even four or five times, provided that there is substance to his words.

This passage offers a few curiosities. Beyond the obvious drama of the whole thing, note that it is assumed that the folks inside the court will continue debating the matter of the convict’s guilt even as the convict has already been taken to the place of execution. Is this an academic issue for them, which merits continued discussion? Does it have to do with the previous issue of disagreeing about the contradictions between the prosecution’s witnesses? And how long does the horseback rider have to stand there waiting for the courtroom reporter, if you will, to come out waving the scarf? What happens if the court changes its mind, and the reporter desperately waves the scarf, but it’s too late? What happens if it’s not too late, but the horseback rider doesn’t see the scarf?

Another interesting thing about this passage is the implication that the execution takes place far away from the court. Much of the daf tries to find biblical anchoring for the distance from Moses-time justice, but there is also some commentary that suggests practical logic:

אִין, כִּדְקָאָמְרַתְּ. וְהָא דְּקָתָנֵי הָכִי, נָפְקָא מִינַּהּ דְּאִי נָפֵיק בֵּי דִינָא וְיָתֵיב חוּץ לְשָׁלֹשׁ מַחֲנוֹת, עָבְדִינַן בֵּית הַסְּקִילָה חוּץ לְבֵית דִּין, כִּי הֵיכִי דְּלָא מִיתְחֲזֵי בֵּית דִּין רוֹצְחִין. אִי נָמֵי, כִּי הֵיכִי דְּתִיהְוֵי לֵיהּ הַצָּלָה.

The Gemara answers: Yes, it is as you said, that the place of stoning was outside the three camps. And the practical difference from the fact that the mishna teaches the halakha in this manner is that if it happened that the court went out and convened outside the three camps, even then the place of stoning is set up at a certain distance from the court, and not immediately adjacent to it, so that the court should not appear to be a court of killers. Alternatively, the reason the place of stoning must be distanced from the court is so that the condemned man might have a chance to be saved, i.e., so that during the time it takes for him to be taken from the court to the place of stoning someone will devise a claim in his favor.

In other words, there are several reasons for setting the place of execution at a distance. One of them has to do with the optics of the court as a place of compassion. It’s not a nod at any modern notion of separation of powers; rather, it is the idea that associating adjudication with execution is unsavory and can lead to antipathy and, possibly, undermining of the court’s authority/legitimacy. The other one is precisely to facilitate the scarf-to-horseback method of postconviction review, which implies that people might still be working in the condemned’s interest even after the sentence is pronounced.

Having taught postconviction review and exonerations in law school, this stuff makes me think of the last-minute horrors that happen every time an execution approaches. Last-minute appeals, desperate litigation, petitions to the Governor, etc. Three years ago we marked a decade from the execution of Troy Davis, a man who many believe (and believed back then, as well) to be innocent of the crime. I remember collecting signatures to send to the Governor of Georgia to spare Troy’s life and holding a sit-in at my office about the case. In the years after Davis’ conviction, seven of the nine witnesses against him recanted, stating that they were subjected to police coercion, and persuasive evidence emerged that another man–the initial suspect–had committed the crime and, in fact, confessed to it. Not a shred of physical or forensic evidence connected Davis to the crime. We were unsuccessful and Davis was executed.

Even those saved by the “wave of the scarf” at the last minute have to endure disbelief, humiliation, and–when their compensation lawsuits fail–penury. One examples is John Thompson, who was convicted of a robbery and an unrelated capital murder in Louisiana; the crucial piece of evidence collected at the crime scene was a blood sample, which was never tested, and whose existence remained hidden from the defense for eighteen years, until a month before Thompson’s execution, when a PI working for the defense uncovered it. The blood did not match Thompson’s and he was exonerated. He was later unsuccessful in receiving compensation from the state, with the majority opinion claiming that no Brady violation had happened because the untested blood sample was not exculpatory evidence. Thompson wrote a searing op-ed to the New York Times about his experiences:

In 2005, I sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office for what they did to me. The jurors heard testimony from the special prosecutor who had been assigned by Mr. Connick’s office to the canceled investigation, who told them, “We should have indicted these guys, but they didn’t and it was wrong.” The jury awarded me $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year on death row — which would have been paid by the district attorney’s office. That jury verdict is what the Supreme Court has just overturned.

I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued.

Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Because we were sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom have lawyers after their convictions are final. Someone needs to look at those cases to see how many others might be innocent.

If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.

A crime was definitely committed in this case, but not by me.

One only wishes that, rather than basking in the self-appeasement of having done no wrong, these officials, and those who worked with them, vigorously and unceasingly, desperately and demonstrably, waved the scarf so that any distant horseman, on any hill, would see them on time.

Two Federal Rulings on Campus Protests

This week saw two federal district court decisions against Harvard and UCLA, respectively, regarding their failure to protect their Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitic discrimination, which you can read in their entirety here and here. Both complaints have a run-through of the upsetting facts we saw at play in many college campuses last year. I’ve already seen some coverage of the decisions and, as expected, it is understandably politically inflamed (as is some of the language in the briefs and the decisions.) What I hope to contribute to the discussion is a concise run-through of the legal arguments made by the plaintiffs and the defendants, which may illuminate the issues that are likely to come up in future litigation on this topic in the fall.

The Harvard case is a ruling on a motion by Harvard University to strike a complaint, based on the Civil Rights Act, by Students Against Antisemitism (SAA), against the university for its failure to rein in antisemitic behaviors and actions that targeted Jewish and Israeli students. The court dismissed in part and granted in part. The Title VI case based on a deliberate indifference claim will go through, whereas the case based on direct discrimination will not.

Harvard raised two preliminary hurdles to the SAA lawsuit, the first of which involved SAA’s standing to bring it forth. There are three conditions for granting standing to an association: at least one member of the association must have standing to sue individually (members of SAA were affected and targeted by the litany of antisemitic events described in the lawsuit), the interests involved in the lawsuit are germane to the org’s purpose (in this case, fighting antisemitism), and the claims and types of relief sought do not require the participation of individual plaintiffs (which SAA can represent).

The second issue was that the lawsuit was unripe: Harvard argued that it was still in the process of formulating its response to antisemitism on campus. The court, however, rejected this argument, asserting its authority to rule on incidents that already happened. The lawsuit would examine whether actions Harvard had taken before the lawsuit was filed had been adequate and whether they will be adequate going forward.

On the merits, the court acknowledged that SAA brings a valid Title VI case on the basis of deliberate indifference. It has provided a prima facie showing that (1) SAA members suffered harm that (2) hindered their educational opportunities, (3) that the school knew of these deprivations, (4) that the deprivations were related to school programs and activities, and (5) that the school exhibited deliberate indifference toward the denial of these opportunities. Harvard argued that some steps to remedy the situation had been taken, but the court disagreed, characterizing the university response as “indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory.”

By contrast, the court did not find that SAA’s direct discrimination claim was valid. When arguing that discrimination has taken place, plaintiffs have to offer the right comparators: X is discriminated against while Y is not. The examples offered by SAA were diffuse and insufficient to show discrimination: they argued that Harvard canceled speakers who were trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) but not antisemitic speakers. In the broader context of the culture wars, if one is hell-bent on viewing all political questions as lying on a right-to-left axis, this argument might make sense: it shows a progressive bias in speaker invitations. But I think the court was right in discouraging this way of thinking about things, because it is crucially important to disaggregate how people think about various questions of social, political, and economic interest. Take a look, for example, at this interesting story in the Stanford Review. Overall, yes, there’s a proliferation of leftiness on campus, but when one digs into the nuances of student opinions, one finds rich diversity on questions of foreign policy, domestic civil rights, and fiscal policy. Students and faculty who are deprived of a say in the invitation of speakers on Israel/Gaza/Hamas/Palestine might not be deprived of a say in gender policies. I also think that the association of “rightthink” on gender matters and “rightthink” on the Middle East is misguided at best and poisonous at worst, for reasons that should be obvious to any thinking person on either side of both issues. I like that the court decided not to conflate this stuff.

The UCLA case that resulted in a preliminary injunction revolved around the university’s failure to dismantle an encampment at the Royce Quad, which barred students for entering for failing to dismantle an encampment. The injunction prohibits UCLA from offering any educational programming to which Jewish students do not have access, and from colluding in preventing Jewish students from attending programs on campus in the future where other students can do so.

The plaintiffs in this case, by contrast to the Harvard case, were three Jewish students, who argued that they were prevented from accessing the Royce Quad, including the library, because of an encampment whose members would confront them about their opinions about Israel. Despite the fact that the plaintiffs were directly affected, UCLA argued lack of standing, making the point that there was no proof that such hindrances would be in place in the future. The court, clearly incensed about the antisemitic incidents at UCLA, rejected this logic, expressing concerns about how the fall semester would unfold given the university’s paltry response to the spring encampment.

Another argument brought about by UCLA was lack of causation, which I think is best understood as a “wrong defendant” argument. The protestors, it is claimed, were private students and entities, and the university itself did not contribute to what happened with the encampments. The court swiftly did away with this arguments as well, finding that UCLA continues to offer educational opportunities knowing that the Jewish students cannot avail themselves of these opportunities (including physical access to campus areas and buildings).

There are three conditions for obtaining a preliminary injunction: (1) likelihood of success, (2) irreparable harm to the plaintiffs should the injunction not be granted, and (3) a balance of equities. It looks like the federal judge thought that this lawsuit would eventually succeed, that the students’ education would be hampered were the injunction not to be granted, and that the discomfort, such as it is, to UCLA in having to grant equal access to its programming to all students did not outweigh the injury to the plaintiffs.

A few general observations are in order. First, while not all the facts in these cases were germane for the disposition of these preliminary matters (the actual lawsuits could drag on for years), they do paint a distressing picture of the daily life on campus. The images from Columbia are, of course, in the news today due to their president’s resignation, but the stuff quoted in these lawsuits is profoundly upsetting and dovetails with things I’ve heard from clients and colleagues about other campuses. I’m left wondering whether the emotional effect of the real-time unfolding of these events will wear out as the lawsuits go on. That the judges in both cases were deeply disturbed is evident in both decisions, though the Massachusetts judge uses more measured tones.

The second observation has to do with the proverbial “incident of the dog in the nighttime”–an issue that some might have expected to be brought up, but does not come up in either case, which surprised me because of its centrality to the Brandeis lawsuit against Berkeley Law–namely, whether Zionism is germane to Judaism to the point that hostile action against people for adhering to Zionist worldviews counts as religious discrimination. It simply did not come up at all in either case. The UCLA decision identifies the plaintiffs as “three Jewish students who assert they have a religious obligation to support the Jewish state of Israel,” taking their nexus between religion and political opinion at face value. The Harvard decision summarily acknowledges the proper basis for discrimination: religion (against Jews) and national origin (against Israelis.) It looks like both judges were not interested in the minutiae of how this debate unfolds in the intellectual communities which they examined, such as: can you disaggregate Zionism from Israeliness, can you disaggregate it from Jewishness, can you disaggregate it from support of, or objection to, the Israeli government, and other hairsplitting typologies and dichotomies in which academics are profoundly interested but judges and lawyers are not. It might be that the judges simply concluded what many of us also have: if it walks and quacks like a duck, that’s what it is, regardless of the verbal pretzeling around who might be a Jew and nevertheless pass muster with the protestors. It’s also a valuable lesson for potential plaintiffs and defendants in these cases of what to focus on. I’ve recently observed that what seems of high importance to academic (e.g., the particulars of why this or that expression is an antisemitic dogwhistle given the history and semantics of bigotry) is of little importance to people more worried about concrete examples of physical violence, vandalism, blocking entrance, etc. What I take away from this is the following: plaintiffs can and should grow thicker skins and focus on clear, discrete examples of discrimination and administrative inaction, while defendants should not prepare to expound on why they were violent and vicious toward someone because of quality A but not quality B. Looks like, when things come to court, no one cares.

Are You a Self-Made Job Market Kryptonite? Develop Some Common Sense or Suffer the Consequences. Also, a First Amendment Primer Tailored for Your Campus Needs

Since writing this, and reading this, I expected things to deteriorate, and of course, they have: students who have publicly supported terrorists are suing private law firms that rescinded their job offers. This is absurd for reasons I’ve explained in a prior post:

It is also important to distinguish the right to free speech from the consequences of putting oneself out in public espousing horrendous views. Several law students in fancy schools are finding out, to their shock and surprise, that law firms are not all that keen to hire people who publicly extol the virtues of slaughtering, raping, maiming, burning alive, beheading, and kidnapping people. That being an antisemitic idiot with repugnant views is not a professional asset and has consequences in the job market shouldn’t be particularly surprising, unless you spent your undergraduate years under the tutelage of morally bankrupt people for whom espousing these “edgy” and “interesting” views was a calculated career strategy that catapulted them to prominence in fields like ethnic studies (read here a courageous letter by a UC Regent calling out the Ethnic Studies faculty council letter for what it is.) No wonder these students think they can spew horrid opinions in public and face no consequences whatsoever. What I find most amazing about the whole thing is that some of my colleagues are surprised by what they see on the campus quad. How is any of this surprising? Academic institutions, including the ones I work for, have breathed life into this Golem for years, and the last thing they should find astonishing is when it comes for them. They taught these people, but they didn’t educate them, and the proof’s in the rancid pudding.

But the thing that really gets my goat about this ridiculous lawsuit is that I’ve spent years either representing, or consulting for, activists, direct action folks, civil disobedients, etc. Doing this kind of work hones one’s fine sense of smell for who is the real deal and who is a performative, egomaniacal joke, i.e., who truly wants to effectuate change in world and who wants people to applaud them online. One tell-tale sign is that people who truly and selflessly believe in what they are doing are willing to take the risk of harsh consequences for what they believe. The animal rights folks I helped defend did not believe they were committing a crime by saving animals and documenting animal abuse in factory farms, but they did know that the counties that house these farms and the Farm Bureau lobbyists that fund the justice system in these counties would consider what they did a crime, and the result could be arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration. They welcomed this eventuality, which would be very unpleasant for them, because they thought that criminal trials would be a way to raise the issues publicly whether or not they won and lost (of course, these are not all animal rights activists: many of them would rather make pig noises at Jewish speakers in City Hall than to do actual animal rights work, i.e., help the many animals who suffer from the war on both sides of the border. But that’s neither here nor there).

Anyone who thinks that a private lawsuit against a firm to protect one’s own bright future and pecuniary interests is going to move the needle on war in the Middle East is either disingenuous or an idiot (or both). Perhaps as disingenuous, or as much of an idiot, as the NLG clowns who advised law students that disrupting an event at someone’s private residence, which you are attending thanks to the owner’s personal generosity, somehow counts as consequence-immune free speech. Since it appears that all these supposed lawyers and law students have completely forgotten what they were taught in constitutional law, here are some reminders of the basics, complete with examples.

The First Amendment reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Like the entire U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment operates in the individual-versus-government space. It is the government that is forbidden from curtailing one’s free speech in public, not private entities–be they individuals, faculty members, students, student groups, etc.–and certainly not in private spaces. This is why suing a private employer who doesn’t want a shrill terrorism supporter to draw a salary from them is absurd. Here are a few other examples:

Also, odious as the “context” comments of the university presidents were at the hearing were, they were legally correct: when deciding whether something is protected or not, context does matter a lot:

Here are some recognized exceptions to the freedom of speech:

And here are the rules about some of the exceptions that come up most frequently in the context of student and faculty opinions about the war:

Fighting Words. These are defined, per Chaplinsky v. NH (1942), as words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.” The burden of proof is pretty high–Clear and Present Danger, per Termiliano v. Chicago (1949).

Defamation. I’ve seen examples of horrific maligning of people on social media. Insofar as these people are public figures, it will be hard to prevail on defamation. Per NYT v. Sullivan (1964), “[t]he constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with ‘actual malice’ – that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Incitement to Imminent Lawlessness/Violence. Here, too, hyperbole doesn’t suffice to create the exception: “The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” The example given in Schneck v. U.S. (1919) is the classic “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre.”

True Threat. It is not protected speech to “direct a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death” (VA v. Black (2003)), but most of the stuff that gets yelled around campus would not be classified as “true threat” but rather as “political hyperbole.” For example, to say during the Vietnam war, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” is the latter (Watts v. U.S. (1969)).

Solicitation to Commit Crime. In criminal law, at common law, the term “solicitation” applies to a scenario where a person requests or induces another person to commit an act that would amount to a felony. In the context of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has punted on opportunities to clearly define criminal solicitation. Again, judging from the other exceptions, specificity would be key here.

As you can see, this means that free speech is very broad in the U.S. context. Which doesn’t mean that using it incessantly is necessarily a good idea. Recently, a beleaguered Harvard concluded that the best policy is to stay away from statements and proclamations on matters that do not directly concern the educational mission of the school (Syracuse is following, and I expect other schools as well–my own workplace does this, and this letter from the Dean of Stanford Law makes the same point.) But this does not apply, obviously, to individuals within the university. I know very well what it’s like to work and study when surrounded by behaviors that are covered by the First Amendment, none of which on its own is beyond the pale, but whose cumulative effect is corrosive. Because, just like the people yelling and distributing terrible flyers, you are an individual with free speech rights, use them! Take a page out of Ron Hassner’s initiative. I joined him for one night at my office and it felt good to do or say something, too, not just remain mute in the face of upsetting things happening.

That said, you and your psyche come first, and we could all immensely benefit from stopping the ridiculous concept creep of the phrase “I felt unsafe.” Choose your battles, act accordingly, and shrug off any nonsense that will not move the needle one way or the other. If you think that this stuff will affect your actual safety (not just your job satisfaction), then I think you should act.

#FacultyVigil Tomorrow Night at My Office

My colleague and new friend Ron Hassner, who teachers political science at Berkeley, has been sleeping in his office for more than a week. Ron is protesting against the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from violent antisemitic behaviors, like the horrifying attack of last week. His list of demands is fairly modest: he wants Sather Gate opened, protection for speakers assaulted by students with opposing views, and campus-wide education on antisemitism and Islamophobia. Julia Steinberg reports for The Free Press:

“This is a campus known for its protest,” Hassner says. “Put up propaganda! Hang it everywhere! But don’t physically block students from walking. Don’t harass them. Please don’t strangle them. I think it’s possible to advocate for the Palestinian cause without strangling people.” 

I agree, which is why I will join Ron and several of my colleagues at the UC system to stage a #FacultyVigil tomorrow night. We all want to work and study safely. The boundaries of free speech in the US are wide enough to include lots of ways to disagree and express conflicting opinions without resorting to violence and terrorizing. If anyone wants to visit on Tue, I’ll likely be at the office (333 Golden Gate #320) from 7pm until my 9am class the next morning. If anyone shows up, maybe we can do a movie night (I propose Footnote) or we can just have a nice chat.

Malcolm Feeley on the Universities’ Stammering on Antisemitism

(pictured above: architect Shari Mendes assisting military troops in handling female genocide victims.)

Prof. Malcolm Feeley, my legendary PhD supervisor and, for the last 25 years, my mentor, coauthor, and good friend, is one of the pioneering giants of the law and society field. He is universally admired and loved, and for good reason. Amidst the many characteristics that make him an outstanding researcher and thinker is his almost mythical ability to make sharp and revealing analogies across space and time. For example, in his amazingly creative address upon receiving the Paul Tappan prize, he compared convict transportation in the Early Modern era to electronic monitoring (I commented about it here). In his work on guilty pleas (Malcolm is the granddaddy of lower criminal court research) he made the paradigm-generating analogy between the prosecutor-driven generation of plea bargains to the transition from bazaars to supermarkets.

In an excellent opinion piece in The Hill, Prof. Feeley, who taught and researched at elite universities for fifty years (including a long stretch at Berkeley and respectable stints in academic administration, including as the President of the Law & Society Association and the Chair of the JSP program at Berkeley), draws on his formidable analogy powers to diagnose the reason for the stuttering university responses to the eruption of antisemitism on campus. It is a bitter, cutting analogy between the decisions faced by the university presidents and those faced by President Roosevelt during World War II not to save the Jews from the concentration camps. He explains:

Early in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt learned of Nazi plans to systematically murder European Jews. Later, advisors urged him to order the bombing rail lines leading to Auschwitz. He rejected their pleas. Actions to prevent these murders, he responded, would turn the war into a campaign to save Jews, and in so doing undermine American’s support for the war.

And now?

On Oct. 7, we witnessed the most deadly pogrom, excepting the Holocaust, against Jews in modern history, and thousands of people danced in the streets, not only in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran, but also on campuses in Philadelphia, New York, Cambridge, Ithaca, and Berkeley. At the time, no university official on a major U.S. campus that I know of unequivocally denounced this action as a pogrom against Jews and excoriated their students and faculty for celebrating the occasion.

Two months later, on Dec. 5, presidents of three major universities at which celebrations of the pogroms took place — Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania — were questioned at a hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee. Their collective responses were even feebler than those issued immediately after the pogrom. When called upon to say that the calls for the support of the pogrom of Oct. 7 were antithetical to Harvard’s institutional values, President Claudine Gay could only say, “I personally oppose this,” and then parse the speech/action distinction, defend speech, and announce that Harvard had beefed up security for its Jewish students. Nowhere did she say such views had no place on Harvard’s campus, and that she was ashamed to have such students and faculty at Harvard. President Sally Kornbluth of MIT and President Elizabeth Magill of Penn, fared only slightly better. All reacted defensively. None showed moral clarity, or demonstrated leadership. All obfuscated. At best, they seemed managers trying to cope rather than inspired leaders of noble institutions. At these universities, where almost all the students receive A’s, these educators failed.

This is not because they are anti-Semites or embrace the cause of Hamas. Rather, I think it is because they face the FDR dilemma: If they single out, and in no uncertain terms condemn, anti-Semites on their campuses, they run the risk of alienating a significant portion of the social justice constituency that they have helped to create and in part to whom they owe their positions.

You should read the piece in its entirety.

Malcolm also includes a factual tidbit I was unaware adds a piece of information that I didn’t know, but which doesn’t surprise me: a colleague of ours hired a survey firm to do a poll at Berkeley, and it turns out that 53% of the students enthusiastically shouting “from the river to the sea”–folks enrolled at the best public university in the United States–don’t know which river and which sea, along with much other breathtaking ignorance.

I deeply and fervently hope that the many thousands of academics around the world who admire and respect Malcolm will take the time to read his opinion piece and consider where they stand vis-á-vis the poison on campus. I also hope that they read the heartbreaking article in the New York Times about the horrific and systematic rapes perpetuated by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 massacre.

If Someone Says, “Thanks for a Great Semester!” Give Them a Turing Test

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate the birth of their Savior, and a Happy Jewish Carpenter day to those who eat Chinese food! In lieu of Frankincense and Myrhh, I bring to you today a higher(?) ed story to gladden (or besmirch) your Yuletide.

Because working full time at UC Law SF and studying full time at the GTU (and parenting full time, of course) was apparently not enough, this fall I taught, via Zoom, an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley which, last I checked, was the highest ranked public university in the nation. I kept most of my tales of woe about this experience off the socials and this blog, though a handful of regular readers (specifically, those who had professional dealings with me that were related to said class) got a running commentary of my experiences with our bright young minds (perhaps more of a running commentary than they would wish for). I may some day share more about this peculiar adventure and what it taught me about the future of humanity. Today, however, offered such a remarkable coda to the experience that it’s just too good not to share.

This morning at 9:35am, I received an email notification that “Melany’s OtterPilot Has Joined Your Meeting.” Seeing as my usual class time was Tuesday at 9:40am, this would appear to be a praiseworthy and timely log-in, except for two facts: (1) the entire semester–including the final exam–ended weeks ago; and (2) today is the day after Xmas which, even if you were spectacularly obtuse and spent your semester under a rock, would have clued you in to the fact that no class would be taking place.

I was ablaze with curiosity, so I logged on as well, to see who I would encounter there. And, indeed, right there in the Zoom room was a black rectangle representing Melany–no different than the one that represented Melany all semester long–waiting for me. I popped on my camera and said, “well, hello there,” and the rectangle disappeared.

A brief Internet search explained that OtterPilot is an AI thingy that essentially attends virtual classes for you so that you don’t have to. It is quite possible that this was in wide use throughout the semester, i.e., for all I know, you guys, I spent the last four months of my one wild and precious life lecturing to 180 bots.

If that was the case, it would certainly explain (1) the turned-off cameras (“respect people’s privacy/trauma/inconvenience/camera shyness”); (2) the lack of participation (“take into account that they’ve been through a pandemic”) and (3) the, how shall we say, lackluster executive function, general knowledge, and communication skills that were in evidence throughout.

Joyeux Noel to all!

Association of Jewish Studies, Day 1: Dreyfus Postcards, DEI and Antisemitism, and Daughters’ Inheritance

As hinted in various posts, my big professional pivot has been in the works for a while. This year I started my rabbinical studies at the International Institute of Secular Humanistic Judaism (IISHJ). IISHJ requires all its rabbis to complete an advanced degree in Jewish Studies, which brought me to the Graduate Theological Union’s Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies. In addition to my full-time work, I’m studying full time for a masters degree, and this week I finished the first semester. My plan is to pivot my scholarship at UC Law SF toward Jewish law and Jewish studies, and I have big plans for fostering and encouraging a vibrant academic Jewish legal experience on campus. After retirement from legal academia, I plan to turn to rabbinical work full time.

Today marks an important milestone: I attended my first-ever annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies which, conveniently, is being held in San Francisco. I’m not presenting anything–my two brand-new papers haven’t been submitted for publication yet–and it’s been a great experience to listen, rather than talk! Getting into a new field requires quite a bit of humility, and I confess to being overwhelmed when I visited the huge book exhibit and saw the vast wealth of knowledge and original research. It’s daunting and, at the same time, exciting to join such a prolific enterprise, and I wonder what I can contribute to this flourishing field.

I started my day with a panel on visual representations of violence, in which Louis Kaplan introduced us to the work of photographer John Guttman. Trained as an expressionist painter, Guttman switched to photography when he figured that he would not be able to leave Berlin with money, but would be allowed to take expensive equipment out of the country. He bought a wonderful camera and somehow persuaded a German news agency to be their foreign correspondent in San Francisco… and ended up in a gorgeous apartment in Russian Hill. From Tara Kohn we learned about how archival gaps and absences affect our ability to learn about photography–in this case the work of Alter Kacyzne, who documented Jewish life in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. Only 700 of Alter’s many photographs are in existence–but evidence of their existence exists in copies and references, as if they were fossils. But the most interesting bit, to me, was Karine Macarez’s presentation of… postcards, posters, and trading cards about the Dreyfus Affair! In my work on true crime podcasts, I always think about Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message reminder, but here is proof that participatory, sensationalist true crime engagement–complete with wrongful conviction activism–existed through the creation, sale, and exchange of these postcards, which are rife not only with antisemitic tropes (used both straightforwardly, as in the case of Dreyfus’s maligners, and ironically, by the Dreyfusards) but also with actual forensic evidence: people would buy and collect postcards bearing Dreyfus and Esterhazy’s handwriting.

After lunch, I attended a panel in which Amy Simon (Michigan State), Greg Drinkwater (Berkeley), Nathan Paradise (Minnesota), and Lauren Strauss (American) spoke of their activism–unpaid, emotionally taxing, and exhausting work–to include Jewish concerns and marginalization in the academic curriculum, especially after the Hamas massacre and the eruption of the war. The session was very well attended–standing room only–and offered some thoughts about whether, and to what extent, Jewish issues (including antisemitism) can and should fit in a DEI framework. Lots of useful takeaways, including the huge variation among campuses not only in policies and curricula but also in the interpersonal relationships between the different personages: campus administration, ethnic studies folks (often, but not always, a department devoid of Jewish voices), Jewish studies departments (which are not supposed to be advocacy centers but sometimes become such), Islamic studies departments and colleagues (who sometimes form great coalitions) and the student body (including a big conversation about the extent to which TikTok and the like shape young minds before they even come to college.) It was a great conversation which, while not offering a ton of hope, offered some interesting perspectives and ideas to try, and made me feel a lot less alone than before. I also plan to read Kenneth Stern’s The Conflict Over the Conflict (and will post a review soon.)

I then got to hear a fabulous roundtable about women and biblical law, featuring several interesting projects. Yael Landman, who uses a law-and-literature lens, discussed women’s property rights, especially regarding daughters’ dowries and inheritance; Samantha Rainford, who also studies inheritance roles, highlighted how the the daughters of Zelophechad had to be legally “made into men” in order for their inheritance to fit into the patriarchal lens. GTU’s very own Jennifer Lehmann studies maleness and masculinity in the Bible; as she explains, while men have been the focus of Biblical literature, only recently have they been studied through a gendered lens. She discussed two fascinating examples: Jacob’s sexuality in the Leah/Rachel bait-and-switch, and Joseph’s sexual victimization at Potiphar’s house (including issues of sexual servitude–and comparisons with Hagar.) And Sarah Shechtman discussed embodiment in biblical ritual.

I learned a ton, bought a heavily discounted set of the Bavli with English translation, and I hope made some new friends. Back tomorrow for more!