International Board
Chair, Sir Peter Roth
Sir Peter Roth is a judge of the High Court of England and Wales, and the president of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. He was previously in legal practice as a barrister, specialising in competition and public law. He was a Visiting Professor at King’s College, University of London until his judicial appointment, and in 1987 a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of legal books and articles and President of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. He is the son of the late Dr Stephen Roth, in whose memory the Institute was established.
Yishai Blank is Professor of Law at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law, and the Faculty’s former Vice Dean for Academic Affairs. His areas of research and teaching include Local Government Law, Administrative Law, Global Cities, Urban Legal Policy, Law and Secularism, and Legal Theory. Professor Blank obtained his LL.B. and an additional B.A in Philosophy (both magna cum laude) from Tel-Aviv University. He clerked for the Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, and practiced law in the leading law firm I. Gornitzky & Co. Professor Blank continued his studies at Harvard Law School, where he was a Byse Fellowship recipient, and where he received his LL.M. in 1999 and his S.J.D. in 2002. He was a member of the Young Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences Forum of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities, and he is a two-times recipient of prestigious fellowship from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF). Professor Blank is expected to be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the Fall 2017, and he has been a visiting professor in Cornell, Brown, University of Toronto (Canada), Queen’s University (Canada), Sciences Po Law School (Paris), Hamburg University (Germany), and the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Spain). Professor Blank’s works have been published in law journals in the United States and in Israel, including Stanford Law Review (forthcoming), Cornell Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Harvard Journal of International Law, Fordham Urban Law Journal, the Urban Lawyer, Tel-Aviv University Law Review, and Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.
Sir Andrew Burns
Sir Andrew Burns was British Ambassador to Israel from 1992-1995 and is currently Strategic Adviser to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
From 2010 to 2015 he was the United Kingdom Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, and in 2014/15 Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
He is Chair of Oasis of Peace UK, the British Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam in Israel; and, having earlier chaired the Anglo-Israel Association, he now leads a programme of biennial Anglo-Israel Colloquia on policy issues.
He was British Consul-General in Hong Kong from 1997-2000 and British High Commissioner to Canada from 2000-2003. His earlier diplomatic postings were to India, Romania and the United States.
An academic lawyer, she was Principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford (1991 to 2004) and also chaired the UK Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority, a national committee charged with regulating assisted reproductive treatments and embryo research. She was a Governor of the BBC (2002-2006) and a Rhodes Scholarships Trustee (1996-2006). From 2004 to 2008 she was the first Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education for England and Wales, the national campus ombudsman for 147 universities. From 2009 she has chaired the Bar Standards Board, regulating barristers, their training, conduct and practice. In 2009 she completed a report for the Department of Health on Women Doctors - Making a Difference.
She is a patron of the Community Security Trust, a member of the All Party Britain-Israel Parliamentary Group, and of the International Council of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She has been Jewish Care Woman of Distinction and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Ben Gurion University in 2012.
She was created a life peer in 2005 and sits in the House of Lords as a non-party legislator, where she speaks frequently on Jewish and Israeli matters. She is a member of the Lords Communications Select Committee which considers the media and the creative industries.
Menachem Fisch holds the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Chair for History and Philosophy of Science, and is Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Kogod Center for the Renewal of Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem.
He is former Chair of the Graduate School of Philosphy at Tel Aviv University, former President of the Israel Society for History and Philosophy of Science, former Chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science at the Israel Academy of Science.
He has held visiting research positions at Queen’s College, Oxford, Trinity College, Cambridge, The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Dibner Institute for Advanced Study in the History of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Collegium Budapest.
Menachem Fisch is Chair of the Cohn Institute’s Board and Academic Committee, and serves as Co-Editor of the newly established HOPOS, The Journal of the International Society for the History of the Philosophy of Science.
Professor Sir Jeffrey Jowell QC is a practicing lawyer at Blackstone Chambers. He is Emeritus Professor of Public Law at University College London (where he was twice Dean of the Law Faculty and a Vice Provost). He was knighted (KCMG) in the Queen's Honours List 2011 "for services to human rights, democracy and the rule of law".
Jowell served as the Director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law since its launch in December 2010.
He has also acted as constitutional advisor to a number of national governments in the Commonwealth, Asia and currently, in the Middle East, including assisting with the constitutions and public law of South Africa, Jersey, Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands and the Maldives. From 2000—2011 Jeffrey served as the UK's member on the Council of Europe's Commission for Democracy through Law (The Venice Commission).
Mr. Philip Kessler
Philip J. Kessler, co-founding partner of Hoffman & Kessler LLP, has decades of experience in successfully handling and trying a wide range of important and high stakes commercial and intellectual property cases throughout the United States in the federal and state trial and appellate courts and in arbitration.
He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers where he served on its Board of Regents and Executive Committee. He is also a Fellow of the International Society of Barristers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.
Phil is a Life Member of the Judicial Conference of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; a Life Fellow of the American and Michigan State Bar Foundations; Trustee, Executive Committee member and Secretary of the US Supreme Court Historical Society; a Development Board member of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law in London, England and US Chair and President of the Bingham Centre's US affiliate, The International Rule of Law Project, Inc.
Dr. Hanna Lerner is a senior lecturer in political science. Her research focuses on comparative constitution writing, particularly in societies divided over the vision of their state, religion and politics, democratic theory and on global justice and international labor rights.
She received her BA in philosophy and history and her MA in philosophy (magna cum laude) from Tel-Aviv University. She earned her MPhil and PhD in political science from Columbia University, New York.
Dr. Lerner is the author of Making Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Global Justice and International Labour rights (with Yossi Dahan and Faina Milman-Sivan, Cambridge University Press, 2016) and of Constitution Writing, Religion and Democracy (with Asli Bali, Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her articles appeared in numerous books and in journals including Law and Social Inquiry, World Politics, Michigan Journal of International Law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Constellations, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Social Philosophy, Cornell International Law Journal. She had also co-edited a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on religion and constitutionalism.
In 2014 she co-convened a research group on constitutionalism, religion and human rights at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University, Germany. Dr. Lerner also held visiting fellowships at Princeton University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Before joining Tel Aviv University she served as deputy director of the School of Educational Leadership at the Mandel Institute in Jerusalem. She also has vast experience as a journalist and radio news editor, and was the founding-director of the news department of Radio Darom.
Martin Paisner attended St Paul’s School, London(1956-1961), the Sorbonne, Paris(1961-1962), WorcesterCollege, Oxford(1962-1965) and the Universityof Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA(1966-1967). He obtained an MA from Oxfordand an LLM from Michiganand holds an Honorary PhD from Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
Martin qualified as a solicitor in January 1970 and became a partner with Paisner & Co in 1972 (that firm having merged with Berwin Leighton to form Berwin Leighton Paisner in May 2001). He has specialised throughout his career in the areas of charity law and private client practice.
Dr. Robert Schwarcz, Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland (USA), is an internationally renowned neuroscientist, who has pioneered the study of molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. The nephew of the late Dr. Stephen Roth, Dr. Schwarcz has been active in Jewish affairs since his youth and provides substantive academic as well as familial perspectives to the Board.
Dr. Amir Teicher
Amir Teicher received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 2014. Written under the supervision of Prof. Shula Volkov and Prof. Eva Jablonka, his thesis was on “The Impact of Mendel’s Theories on the Humanistic Sciences in Germany, 1900-1936.” Since then, Amir has completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University’s Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. Amir’s research interests include the study of Nazism, the development of scientific methods in modern Europe and their influence on the social sciences, the history of biological thought, and the connection between statistical and visual methods of analysis. Through his historical work, Amir seeks to understand the development of scientific methods in their cultural contexts and to highlight the dynamic relationship between the concept of expert knowledge and its influence on interpretations of human nature and society.
Amir Teicher is a lecturer in TAU's Department of History.
Ex-officio member: Prof. Leo Corry, Dean of the Faculty
Prof. Leo Corry is the Dean of the faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University. His research interests are in the History of Modern Algebra; History of Number Theory; Mathematical Physics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century; The Euclidean Tradition in The Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period; David Hilbert and the Göttingen School; Nicolas Bourbaki and its Influence on Modern Mathematics; History of General Relativity; The Intellectual World of Albert Einstein; Modernism and Science; Science in Israel; Science in Latin America; The Intellectual World of Jorge Luis Borgese.
Former Members
Prof. Natan Lerner was an active board member until December, 2015
Born in Poland and educated in Argentina, he obtained his law degree in 1950 and his doctorate in Law and Social Sciences in 1958, both from Buenos Aires University. He was a practicing lawyer in Buenos Aires until 1963, when he settled in New York and worked as one of the representatives of the World Jewish Congress at the United Nations. Lerner moved to Israel in 1966, and became director of the Israeli Branch of the World Jewish Congress until 1983. From 1984 to 1989 was director of the International Center for the University Teaching of Jewish Civilization. Simultaneously, he taught International Law and Human Rights at the University level. From 1989 onwards, his main activity was university teaching. After his retirement from Tel Aviv University, after more than 20 years of teaching, Professor Lerner taught at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. His main course was International Law and he also conducted seminars on, among other subjects, State and Religion, Racial Discrimination, Minorities and Genocide. He lectured frequently abroad, was on the experts list of international organizations, and was Consultant to UNESCO on racial discrimination.
Lerner was the author of the following books in English: Religion, Beliefsand Human Rights (Leiden, 2006); Religion, Beliefs and International Human Rights (New York, 2000); Group Rights and Discrimination in International Law(The Hague, 2003); The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Alphen an den Rijn, 1980); The Crime of Incitement to Group Hatred (New York, 1965).
He also published several books in Spanish. His books on Racial Discriminationand on Religion were translated into Japanese, and the one on Group Rights into Spanish. He was the author of many articles in Spanish, English and Hebrew, published in books and journals of Israel, the USA, Spain, Argentina and other countries.
[The Roth Institute mourns the passing of long time board member Prof. Natan Lerner]
[In Memoriam from 'Justice' no. 63]
Prof. Eyal Naveh was an active board member until 2018
Prof. Eyal Naveh is Chair of the History Department at Tel Aviv University and a professor of U.S. history at TAU. He is a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, where he heads the Political Education project. Naveh was the chair of the General and Interdisciplinary Studies program at Tel Aviv University between 2003 and 2007. In addition, he lectures at the Kibbutzim College of Education and is a member of its Academic Council.
Since 2000, Prof. Naveh has led a team of Israeli history teachers engaged in writing a textbook, in conjunction with Palestinian history teachers, that presents both narratives alongside one another. The project is being conducted under the auspices of PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), headed by Professors Dan Bar-On and Sami Adwan. Naveh has also served as advisor on the writing of a history textbook for Arab students who are citizens of Israel. As a member of the Salzburg Global Seminar project, Naveh is involved in efforts to promote historical justice and reconciliation. He is also a member of the academic council of Massuah - School for Holocaust Teaching.
Prof. Naveh has been a visiting professor at Venice International University, the University of Toronto, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history (both summa cum laude) from Tel Aviv University, and completed his Ph.D. under a Fulbright scholarship at the History Department of UC Berkeley.
Prof. Sir Nigel Rodley was an active board member until January, 2017
Sir Nigel Rodley KBE was Professor of Law and Chair of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex where he had taught since 1990. He was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee (since 2001) and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (1993-2001). He was also a Commissioner and President-designate of the International Commission of Jurists and Trustee of the Freedom from Torture (former Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture). He was a member of Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Advisory Group on Human Rights (established November 2010). He was Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Israel Law Review.
He was the founding head of Amnesty International's Legal Office (1973-1990). A former Research Fellow at New York University's Centre for International Studies (1970-73), he had taught at Dalhousie University (1965-68), the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty (1969-72) and the London School of Economics (1973-1990), where he was also a Research Fellow in 1983. He served at UN Headquarters in New York as an Assistant and then Associate Economic Affairs Officer (1966, 1968-69).
Honours: knighted in 1998 for services to human rights and international law; honorary LLD, Dalhousie University (2000); American Society of International Law Goler T Butcher Medal for distinguished work in human rights (2005); Honorary Fellow, Royal College of Physicians Faculty of Forensic Law and medicine (2008).
His publications included the landmark and now standard work The Treatment of Prisoners under International Law (Oxford University Press; 3rd edn., 2009, with Matt Pollard.
[The Roth Institute mourns the passing of long time board member Prof. Sir Nigel Rodley]
[Obituary of Sir Nigel Rodley]
