Tikvah Scholar
Academic Year 2012-2013
Karin Loevy
Karin Loevy is a doctoral candidate at NYU School of Law. Her dissertation centers on the field of emergency powers in public law as it functions through the ideal of crisis management and crisis containment (supervised by Professor Mattias Kumm). Karin completed her LLM at NYU@NUS, Singapore where she received the Dean’s Award and served as a research assistant to Professor Simon Chesterman and to Professor Victor Ramraj on various law and security projects. She received her LLB Magna Cum Laude as well as a BA in History and Philosophy Magna Cum Laude both from Tel Aviv University where she served as a research and teaching assistant in the fields of criminal law, administrative law and law and society and on the editorial board of Plilim the Journal of Public Law, Society and Culture. After her graduation Karin joined a leading Israeli public law firm where she practiced criminal and administrative litigation before both civil and military courts.
Her ‘Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment: The Problem of Emergency and its Paradigmatic Solutions’ was published in September 2011 in the REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol 27 (States of Emergency - States of Crisis). Her introductory paper on Emergencies and Legal Change was presented in December 2011 at the Yale Law School Doctoral Scholarship Conference on the Dynamics of Law and Transformation. Her Case study on Regional Capabilities and the Management of Disasters was presentation in February 2012 at the 3rd AsianSIL Young Scholars Workshop 2012, National University of Singapore.
Research
Containing Threats in the Jurisdiction of Exigencies
Exigency jurisdiction is a term used to relate to a rather broad set of categories by which halakhic authorities could act to deal with exceptional circumstances when application of the ordinary law would produce unacceptable results. These special cases might be seen as Jewish ‘emergency measures’ with their central problematic being – just like in western liberal legal tradition – the ability and the desirability of legally constraining officials responding to threatening events.
But even more than in western liberal traditions, in the thoroughly legal Jewish culture, this theoretical problematic often hides the practical ways in which law figures in anticipating, responding to and recovering from threats. To see the significance of the interaction between law and threat management in a legalistic society, a set of more pragmatic questions must be asked. What types of threats are seen as requiring exceptional or extralegal response? How are they identified? How are they declared and responded to? By whom, when and where? What are the mechanisms for recovery from the damage and loss in crisis? And finally what are the accounts and the justifications for change and continuity surrounding crisis and the practices of its containment? These questions will be answered in this research not in a general manner but by concentrating on a set of Hebrew texts to unravel how exigency measures are negotiated, reformulated - and, if at all, constrained.
