Problematizing Law, Rights and Childhood in Israel/Palestine Book Launch

Please join us for the new book launch of Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine

In this book, Hedi Viterbo radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. He reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children's rights, has used them to hone and legitimize its violence against Palestinians. He exposes the human rights community's complicity in this situation, due to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international law, and its recurring emulation of Israel's security discourse. He examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponize the categories 'child' and 'adult.' Bridging disciplinary divides, Viterbo analyzes hundreds of previously unexamined sources, many of which are not publicly available. Bold, sophisticated, and informative, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine provides unique insights into the ever-tightening relationship between law, children's rights, and state violence, at both the local and global levels.

Speakers:

Alexandra Cox is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex Department of Sociology. Dr Cox came to the University of Essex after serving as an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz in their Department of Sociology. Prior to getting her Ph.D., she worked in the fields of criminal justice and drug policy reform for a number of years, at the American Civil LIberties Union's Drug Law Reform project, the Drug Policy Alliance's Office of Legal Affairs (in California) and then at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, a community-based public defender office in New York City. She has continued to practice as a sentencing mitigation specialist, representing primarily young people charged as adults. Through that work, she has served on the boards of several organizations, including the New York State Defenders Association, Drama Club (which provides theater programming to incarcerated youth), Reentry Columbia, and Literacy for Incarcerated Teens. She was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to support her doctoral work and served as a Soros Justice Advocacy fellow, focusing on the role that frontline workers play in resisting decarceration. In 2017, she was a research fellow at Yale Law School, working on a study about the role of frontline workers in New York's criminal justice system.

Maryam Jamshidi is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Professor Jamshidi teaches and writes in the areas of national security, public international law, the law of foreign relations, and tort law. In particular, her scholarship focuses on the relationship between the private sphere and national security law as well as the law of foreign relations. In exploring these dynamics, Professor Jamshidi’s work draws on political and critical theory, as well as sociology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Colorado Law Review, and Hastings Law Journal. She also regularly publishes in popular media outlets. 

Yaël Ronen is Professor of Law at the Academic Center for Science and Law at Hod Hasharon, and a research fellow at the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the academic editor of the Israel Law Review, published by Cambridge University Press. Her areas of interest include territorial status and the status of non-state actors, particularly as those intersect with questions of human rights, humanitarian law and international criminal law. She received her LLB and LLM from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her PhD from the University of Cambridge, England. Prior to embarking on an academic career, Professor Ronen served almost a decade as a career diplomat and lawyer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was a member of the Israeli team in the negotiations over the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement (the Oslo Accord).

Dr Hedi Viterbo is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Law at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, he was Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at SOAS, University of London, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, and a visiting researcher at Columbia University. He received his PhD in Law from LSE, his LLM (summa cum laude) from Tel Aviv University, and is also a graduate of the latter’s 4-year Interdisciplinary Programme for Outstanding Students. His research examines legal issues concerning childhood, state violence, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and global perspective.

Chairs and Organisers:

Haim Abraham is a Lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law and UCL Faculty of Laws. He holds a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from the University of Toronto, a Master of Law degree from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelor of Law degree combined with the Interdisciplinary Honours Program in the Humanities from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was on the editorial board of the Israel Law Review. Before returning to academia, Dr. Abraham served as a Law Clerk at the Israel State Attorney Office, Civil Department. Dr. Abraham's research and teaching interests include tort law, private law theory, liability of public actors and authorities, the intersections of private and public law, and gender and sexuality law, and he is currently examining states’ moral and legal obligations to compensate non-combatants who suffered wrongful losses during warfare and terrorism activities, using theoretical, doctrinal, and empirical lenses.


Eden Sarid is a Lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law. His research and teaching interests include intellectual property, property law (land and personal property), equity and trusts, the creative economy, innovation policy, and cultural heritage law. Dr. Sarid's current research explores creative industries that deviate from traditional property and intellectual property models; historical and theoretical explorations of patents and copyright; and queer analysis of property and IP. Dr. Sarid received his SJD from the University of Toronto, where he was a Vanier Canada Scholar. He received his LLM from the London School of Economics and Political Science with distinction, and was awarded the Chevening Scholarship by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He received his LLB from the Hebrew University Faculty of Law together with the University's Honours Program for exceptional students in the Humanities.