The Planned Overhaul of Israel’s Judiciary

Event Description This remote program, led by a prominent Israeli scholar, will explain and analyze the legislative package that Israel\u27s Minister of Justice introduced to overhaul the judicial system. The proposal generated unprecedented protests in Israel that received international media coverage. Supporters of the changes justify them as necessary to rein in an unaccountable judiciary. Opponents fear that the removal of the only effective check on executive power in Israel will jeopardize civil liberties, economic prosperity, and Israel’s international standing. Attendees will gain a deep understanding of the issues at hand and what they could mean for the future of Israel. Speaker: Dr. Meital Pinto Pinto is a senior lecturer at the Zefat Academic College, School of Law, and the Ono Academic College, Faculty of Law in Israel. She is also a teaching fellow at the faculty of law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Pinto has an SJD (2009) and LLM (2005) from the University of Toronto, and LLB degree (2003) in Law and Government from Reichman University (IDC) Herzliya, Israel (Magna cum Laude). Prior to her graduate studies, Pinto served as a law clerk to Justice Asher Grunis of the Israeli Supreme Court, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel. During the year 2022, Pinto has been an Israel Institute visiting fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago, where she taught three courses about modern Israel. Pinto’s research focuses on the issues of discrimination, and minority rights within multicultural societies (especially language rights and religious freedom), including the rights of women as minorities within minorities. She teaches Jurisprudence, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Law and Gender

The Absence of the Right to Culture of Minorities within Minorities in Israel: A Tale of a Cultural Dissent Case

The Israeli Plonit case concerns a Muslim woman who wished to be represented by a female arbitrator in a Shari’a Court. The Shari’a Court of Appeals denied her request and decided that Shari’a Law permits only men to serve as arbitrators. Plonit petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, which accepted her petition and decided that the Shari’a Court of Appeals’ decision infringed her right to equality. While I support the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision, my paper sheds a light on a crucial matter that is absent in the decision; namely, the right to culture of Muslim women, who are a vulnerable members of a minority group in Israel, and therefore constitute a “minority within minority”. Analysing the case in terms of Plonit’s right to culture, in addition to her right to equality, has two advantages. First, it stresses the main issues at the heart of the legal debate, which are the minority culture’s norms and practices, and the right of the minority within the minority to influence and shape them as much as the majority within the minority. Second, when the minority within the minority’s claim is put in terms of the right to culture, and not only in terms of the right to equality, they are not necessarily perceived by other minority members as claims that try to enforce external norms on the minority culture

Equality of Cultural Identity

I address claims of offence of feelings, religious freedom and language rights, which are all ‎justified by the intrinsic interest individuals attach to their culture. I call them ‘claims from ‎cultural identity’. I develop a conception of substantive equality, understood as distributive ‎justice and underpinned by dignity, for regulating claims from cultural identity in the legal ‎system of multicultural states. I call it Equality of Cultural Identity. ‎ It is a ‘complex equality’ model, which takes cultural identity to be a sphere in ‎peoples’ lives. Unlike majority members, cultural minority members are usually under ‎constant pressure to compromise their cultural identity and assimilate in the majority ‎culture to succeed in other spheres of their lives like education and career. In accordance ‎with Walzer’s theory of Spheres of Justice, I propose a regulative principle to determine ‎the extent of cultural protection minority members deserve, according to which the ‎influence of other spheres of their lives on their sphere of cultural identity should as ‎minimal as possible. ‎ I apply this principle to claims of offence to feeling, which I re-conceptualize as ‎claims from integrity of cultural identity. I suggest the vulnerable identity principle: The ‎more vulnerable a person’s cultural identity, the stronger her claim from integrity of ‎cultural identity. This principle enhances a just distribution of symbolic goods between ‎majority and minority members, is based on objective evaluation standards, and avoids ‎legal moralism. Thus, it overcomes the major liberal worries about regulating speech. ‎ With respect to the language rights and religious freedom, I comparatively analyze ‎them qua cultural rights. I argue that the right to religious freedom, which is generously ‎interpreted by courts, bears all of the allegedly unique features of language rights that are ‎used to support their restrained judicial interpretation. Thus, the existing arguments for ‎their restrained interpretation are not valid. I identify a novel argument for their restrained ‎interpretation, which is that they impose a cultural burden on majority members, but ‎drawing on my conception of equality, I argue that it is not sound as the burden they ‎impose is not great.‎SJ

The Planned Overhaul of Israel’s Judiciary

Event Description This remote program, led by a prominent Israeli scholar, will explain and analyze the legislative package that Israel\u27s Minister of Justice introduced to overhaul the judicial system. The proposal generated unprecedented protests in Israel that received international media coverage. Supporters of the changes justify them as necessary to rein in an unaccountable judiciary. Opponents fear that the removal of the only effective check on executive power in Israel will jeopardize civil liberties, economic prosperity, and Israel’s international standing. Attendees will gain a deep understanding of the issues at hand and what they could mean for the future of Israel. Speaker: Dr. Meital Pinto Pinto is a senior lecturer at the Zefat Academic College, School of Law, and the Ono Academic College, Faculty of Law in Israel. She is also a teaching fellow at the faculty of law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Pinto has an SJD (2009) and LLM (2005) from the University of Toronto, and LLB degree (2003) in Law and Government from Reichman University (IDC) Herzliya, Israel (Magna cum Laude). Prior to her graduate studies, Pinto served as a law clerk to Justice Asher Grunis of the Israeli Supreme Court, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel. During the year 2022, Pinto has been an Israel Institute visiting fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago, where she taught three courses about modern Israel. Pinto’s research focuses on the issues of discrimination, and minority rights within multicultural societies (especially language rights and religious freedom), including the rights of women as minorities within minorities. She teaches Jurisprudence, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Law and Gender

Epistemic Equality: Distributive Epistemic Justice in the Context of Justification

Social inequality may obstruct the generation of knowledge, as the rich and powerful may ‎bring about social acceptance of skewed views that suit their interests. Epistemic equality in ‎the context of ‎justification is a means of preventing such obstruction. Drawing on social ‎epistemology and theories of equality and distributive justice, we provide an account of ‎epistemic equality. We regard participation in, and influence over a ‎knowledge-generating ‎discourse in an epistemic community as a limited good that needs to be justly distributed ‎among putative members of the community. We argue that rather than trying to operationally ‎formulate an exact criterion for distributing this ‎good, epistemic equality may be realized by ‎insisting on active participation of members of three groups in addition to credited experts: ‎relevant ‎disempowered groups, relevant uncredited experts, and relevant stakeholders. ‎Meeting these ‎conditions fulfills the political, moral, and epistemic aims of epistemic ‎equality.

Gestational diabetes is driven by microbiota-induced inflammation months before diagnosis

ObjectiveGestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is a condition in which women without diabetes are diagnosed with glucose intolerance during pregnancy, typically in the second or third trimester. Early diagnosis, along with a better understanding of its pathophysiology during the first trimester of pregnancy, may be effective in reducing incidence and associated short-term and long-term morbidities. DesignWe comprehensively profiled the gut microbiome, metabolome, inflammatory cytokines, nutrition and clinical records of 394 women during the first trimester of pregnancy, before GDM diagnosis. We then built a model that can predict GDM onset weeks before it is typically diagnosed. Further, we demonstrated the role of the microbiome in disease using faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) of first trimester samples from pregnant women across three unique cohorts. ResultsWe found elevated levels of proinflammatory cytokines in women who later developed GDM, decreased faecal short-chain fatty acids and altered microbiome. We next confirmed that differences in GDM-associated microbial composition during the first trimester drove inflammation and insulin resistance more than 10 weeks prior to GDM diagnosis using FMT experiments. Following these observations, we used a machine learning approach to predict GDM based on first trimester clinical, microbial and inflammatory markers with high accuracy. ConclusionGDM onset can be identified in the first trimester of pregnancy, earlier than currently accepted. Furthermore, the gut microbiome appears to play a role in inflammation-induced GDM pathogenesis, with interleukin-6 as a potential contributor to pathogenesis. Potential GDM markers, including microbiota, can serve as targets for early diagnostics and therapeutic intervention leading to prevention.Peer reviewe