Tikvah Fellow
Academic Year 2010-2011
Perry Dane
Perry Dane is a Professor of Law at the Rutgers School of Law, Camden. He was previously on the faculty of the Yale Law School, and served as a law clerk to William J. Brennan, Jr., Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Professor Dane is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. His research and teaching interests include the jurisprudence of Jewish law, religion and law, conflict of laws, constitutional law, jurisdiction, American Indian law, the law of charities, legal pluralism, Canadian constitutionalism, and the debate on same-sex marriage. In January 1997, Professor Dane was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. In January 2008, he was a visiting professor at the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law. Professor Dane was also a fellow at the Rutgers Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture during their program on “Secularism.”
Research
'Hanging By a Thread': Toward a Jurisprudence of Jewish Law
I plan to use my year at The Tikvah Center to complete a longstanding project on the jurisprudence of Jewish law (halakhah), proposing a distinctly non-foundational yet robust vision of a halakhic system “constantly interpreting and interpretable, reading and speaking, carved in stone and hanging by a thread, changing and staying constant, without end.” Parts of this project are based on already-published work. In an early article, I examine the halakhah’s distinctive self-image as a pairing of the Written Torah of the Bible with an Oral Torah set down in rabbinic texts. I conclude that the idea of the Dual Torah represents both a commitment to authoritative text and, simultaneously, “a celebration of a stereographic vision of the relation of text and interpretation.” In another article, I argue, contrary to claims by both Jewish “traditionalists” and Jewish “liberals,” that belief in a literal revelation at Mount Sinai is neither necessary nor even sufficient to Jewish halakhic commitment, and that such commitment must arise, if at all, from a holistic meditation on what it means to be a Jew.
The remaining pieces of the project look at two issues with particular contemporary relevance: the relation of halakhah to morality and the challenge of halakhic change. With respect to the former, I argue that the halakhah itself recognizes a realm of moral reasoning outside its four corners, but that the relationship between halakhic and moral reasoning is rich and complex. With respect to the issue of legal change, I hope to articulate a view that recognizes the reality and importance of change while not tethering the process of change to a simple lodestar such as “moral progress.”
