Here - Deborah Charles Publications

- 41 –innocent passengers, even if doing so would save many innocent people on the ground from being killed.This paper argues that this most, if not all, of this scholarship fails to identify a critical distinction, one that is suggested,perhaps serendipitously, in the title of a classic work by the late Professor David Daube, “Collaboration With Tyranny in RabbinicLaw.” Specifically, the paper argues that efforts to frustrate the desires of willful wrongdoers, or tyrants, is fundamentally differentfrom, and more permissible than, collaboration with tyrants.Steven H. Resnicoff is a professor at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, Illinois, and Co-Director of itsCenter for Jewish Law & Judaic Studies (“JLJS”). His most recent book is Understanding Jewish Law was published inMay 2012, and most recent law review article is “Jewish Law and the Tragedy of Sexual Abuse of Children in theOrthodox Jewish Community,” published in June 2012. Prof. Resnicoff is currently working on a book for OxfordUniversity Press examining Jewish law’s approach to live and death choices. His secular law areas of expertise includebankruptcy, commercial paper, and ethics. Yosef Rivlin (Sessions 7, 13)Yosef Rivlin is a Full Professor in the Department of Talmud, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and was Head of that Department in1997-1999. He is also Chair of the Orot Israel Academic College (since 2011) and vice-editor of Jewish Studies – an InternetJournal. A member of the Israel Bar (from 1992), he has also served as Chairman of the Jewish Law Association (2004-2008).His research areas are in Jewish Family Law; Cairo Geniza Legal Documents; Wills and Inheritance; and Bills and Contractsin Jewish Law. His books (in Hebrew) include Jonah with commentary of Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (1986, 2 nd ed. 1995), Billsand Contracts from Lucena (1995, also translated into German); Inheritance and Wills in Jewish Law (1999). He is co-editor ofJewish Law Association Studies XXII (2012), and has authored some 90 articles.Ram RivlinRam Rivlin (Tel Aviv University) – The Death and Afterlife of Modern Jewish Divorce Law (Session 8B)What is Jewish Divorce Law about? According to Halakhah, marriage should be terminated by either concrete grounds for divorce,or by mutual consent of the parties. However, western legal regimes now enable unilateral divorce even in absence of any otherground. In the presence of civil divorce (such as in the US) or secular adjudication of the separation (such as in Israel), the mutualconsent requirement is no longer a barrier for separation. This fact overshadows the inner logic of Jewish divorce law, andradically changes the rationale of the mutual consent requirement, emptying it of its normative content regarding theappropriateness of separation. My paper tracks and analyzes two contemporary rabbinic reactions to this situation. The first acceptsthe civil separation as an independent ground for divorce, hence renders Jewish divorce law ritualistic, dealing primarily withproperly delivering the get whenever marriage is terminated according to secular norms. In contrast, others advocate reinterpretingthe consent requirement as designed to ensure the parties’ rights upon dissolution (such as division of marital property), through abargaining process. According to this view, the consent requirement affects primarily the terms of the divorce settlement, ratherthan the grounds for separation. The paper depicts, explains and evaluates this twofold reaction.Dr. Ram Rivlin studied Law and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His dissertation, which analyzeddivorce negotiation drawing on normative ethics and legal philosophy, won the Moshe Zilberg Prize for outstandingdissertation in the field of law. In 2011-2012, Ram was a Post-Doctoral Scholar at Tikvah Center for Law and JewishCivilization at New York University, being also a Rothschild (Yad Ha-Nadiv) fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. In 2012-2013 Ram is going to be a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.