The Case Against Official Monolingualism: The Idiosyncrasies of Minority Language Rights In israel And The United States

Both Israel and the United States are multi-ethnic societies with a large percentage of linguistic minorities

The Right to Family Life and Civil Marriage Under International Law and its Implementation in the State of Israel

The Article begins by analyzing the characteristics of the right to family life and examining various deªnitions of the “family” under international and Israeli law. It argues that the absence of a clear, standard definition for the “family” and the exclusion of “alternative” family bonds leads to an infringement of the rights of many who, in practice, conduct a family life. Following this discussion, the Article analyzes the degree of protection accorded to the family in various contexts including: the right of the family to social security; parent-child relations; immigration rights based on family ties; and the freedom to marry. The most severe limitation on the right to family life within Israel relates to the lack of an option to marry in a civil ceremony. While international law recognizes the imposition of certain limitations on the freedom to marry, the additional limitations on the right to marry imposed by Jewish religious law constitute a breach of Israel’s international commitments. The Article thus concludes that the only way to guarantee equality within the family context—and to ensure the right of every individual to marry, free of the shackles of religious law, as mandated by international law—is the introduction of civil marriage in Israel

Same-sex unions: the globalization of an idea

What explains why a majority of western democracies have adopted same-sex union (SSU) laws in the past decade and a half? I argue that this startling trend toward policy convergence in part can be explained by the rise of a human rights oriented transnational network of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists as well as the transnationally networked policy elites these activists influence. These networks, however, do not fully determine policy outcomes as is evidenced by the fact that not all western democracies legally recognize same-sex relationships and those that do have adopted different models of SSU laws. To explain these differences, I show how the nature of national religious practices and the perceived legitimacy of international norms by national elites and publics mediate the influence of the transnational networks and the norms they promote