Gruss Workshop: Thinking Legally vs. Thinking Historically

This interdisciplinary workshop brings together scholars of law, history, and religious studies to assess the relationship between legal and historical modes of thought. This idea emerges out of the deep divisions regarding the relative role of historical/contextual vs. doctrinal reasoning in the study of the Jewish law. However, by approaching the issue as a matter of general legal theory, we hope to draw on the parallel experiences of other thought traditions to address the following question: To what extent are lawyers justified in assuming that thousands of individualized acts separated by time, space and social context, form a legal system that transcends any individual action? 

Co-sponsored by Penn Law School and the Jewish Studies Program