Ori Aronson
Bar-Ilan University
Ori Aronson is an associate professor of law at the Bar-Ilan university Faculty of Law, where he also serves as the deputy director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law and the co-director of the Program for the Advancement of Arab Law Students. He received his LL.B. (2004, summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his LL.M. (2006) and S.J.D. (2010) from Harvard Law School, under the supervision of Prof. Martha Minow. Ori served as clerk and legal assistant to the Chief Justice of the Israel Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, and as law clerk to Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, Jon Newman. He joined the Bar-Ilan Law Faculty in 2010, where he teaches on courts, adjudication, civil procedure, constitutional law and theory, legal pluralism, and a Jewish and democratic state. Between 2015-2016 he served as the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation/Israel Institute Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law.
Ori’s research employs both empirical and theoretical methods. It concerns the institutional conditions of adjudication and of the organizations of legal power more broadly, with a focus on the ways legal systems accommodate, reflect, and challenge cultural and ideological difference. He has studied and published on various topics such as the constitutional role of trial courts, jurisdictional politics in religious tribunals, formal and informal judicial hierarchies, judicial behavior on collegial courts, public perception of legal institutions and their agents, judicial review and court specialization. As a scholar of Israeli constitutional law, Ori has studied such issues as Israel’s constitutional and jurisdictional politics, Israel as a nation state, challenges of law and religion, and the structures of state support for the arts.
Since its establishment in early 2023, Ori has been an active member of the Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy, an ad hoc voluntary organization dedicated to providing Israel’s public and policymakers with academically informed knowledge on the implications for democracy of the government’s constitutional reforms.