Tikvah affiliate scholars
Christine Hayes
Christine Hayes is Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, she was Assistant Professor of Hebrew Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University for three years. She has written three books: Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (Oxford University Press, 1997), Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford University Press, 2002) and The Emergence of Judaism (Greenwood Press, 2006). She has also published several articles in Vetus Testamentum, The Journal for the Study of Judaism, The Harvard Theological Review, and various scholarly anthologies. Hayes spent 2005-2006 at the Yale Law School, working on a fourth book, provisionally entitled Rabbinic Authority, Rabbinic Anxiety. She has served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Religious Studies as well as for the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale. From 2004-2006, Hayes was a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center.
Suzanne Last Stone
Suzanne Last Stone is Professor of Law at Cardozo School of Law and Director of Yeshiva University’s Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization. She has held the Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at both the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, and has visited at Princeton, Columbia Law, Hebrew University Law, and Tel Aviv Law. Before teaching, she clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind. Stone writes on the intersection of Jewish legal thought and contemporary legal and political theory.
David Flatto
Professor David Flatto joined the faculty of Penn State Law in 2008 as an assistant professor of law with joint appointments in Penn State’s History and Jewish Studies departments. A rabbinical scholar and ordained rabbi, Professor Flatto will teach Legal History, Constitutional Law, and a joint seminar in Law and Jewish Studies/History.
Professor Flatto’s research interests include the interdisciplinary relationship between law and Jewish studies, including Rabbinic treatment of felons and ex-felons, Rabbinic laws of evidence and criminal theory, and the origins of separation of powers, judicial independence, and sovereign immunity in ancient, medieval, and early modern jurisprudence. His works have appeared in the Yale Law Journal Pocket Part, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, NYU Law Global Hauser Series, Hebraic Political Studies, among others.
While obtaining his doctorate, he was a visiting researcher at Yale Law School and the Gruss Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law. He has also taught at Yeshiva University, Harvard University, and Hebrew College. In 2003, he was honored with a Teacher Recognition Award from the U.S. Department of Education.
