Professor Anat Scolnicov

Biography

Professor Anat Scolnicov studied law at the Hebrew University (LLB), at Harvard Law School (LLM) where she held a Fulbright scholarship, and the London School of Economics (PhD) and is a member of the Israel Bar. She was the Director of Studies in Law and College Lecturer in Law at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University. From January 2008 to 2013 she was also Deputy Director of the Centre for Public Law at Cambridge University. She has lectured on civil liberties in England and Wales, human rights law, women and the law and public law.

Before joining academia, Anat was an attorney for Association for Civil Rights in Israel, litigating, on behalf of ACRI, civil rights and constitutional Supreme Court cases, working on civil rights legislation with a specialisation in freedom of speech, freedom of information, privacy and freedom of religion and conscience. Anat has advised many NGOs on religious freedom; she participated in a UN expert group on the rights of religious minorities and her work has been cited twice by the Supreme Court of Israel.

She is currently providing expert commentary on the constitutional crisis in Israel. Listen to her podcast on the relationship of State and Religion in Israel, in the University of Oxford's Israel Studies Podcast Series. She is available for interviews on this developing situation.

Areas of expertise

• Law, State and Religion
• Feminist Legal Theory
• Public law and International Law?

Publications

Books

• Boundaries of State, Boundaries of Rights: The state, human rights, positive obligations and private parties (ed. with T. Kahana), 2016. Cambridge University Press.
• The Right to Religious Freedom in International Law: Between Group Right and Individual Right" (Routledge, 2012)

Chapters

• 'Human rights and derivative rights – the European Convention of Human Rights and the Rights of Corporations' in Boundaries of State, Boundaries of Rights: the state, human rights, positive obligations and private parties (Cambridge University Press 2016, ed. with T. Kahana)
• 'Introduction' in Boundaries of State, Boundaries of Rights: the state, human rights, positive obligations and private parties (Cambridge University Press 2016, with T. Kahana)
• 'Does constitutionalisation lead to secularization?', in: I. Katznelson and G. Stedman-Jones (eds), Religion and the political imagination (Cambridge University Press 2010), pp 295-313.
• 'Multi-religious Societies and State Legal Systems: Religious Marriages, the State and Implications for Human Rights" in T. Wilhelmsson, E. Paunio and A. Pohjolainen (Eds), Private Law and the many cultures of Europe (Kluwer Law International, 2007), pp 405-416.

Journal articles

• 'On a wing and a prayer', Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (June 2015).
• 'A question of faith' (2010) 69 Cambridge Law Journal, 220-23 (cited by the Supreme Court of Israel in HCJ 7426/08 Tabka v. Minister of Education [31/08/10]).
• 'Religious Freedom and Women's Rights: A Legal Solution to a Human Rights Conflict?' (2007) Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 25, 569-98. (reprinted: 13 Kurdish Human Rights Law Review)
• 'Religious Law, Religious Courts and Human Rights within Israeli Constitutional Structure' (2006) International Journal of Constitutional Law 4, pp. 732-40.
• 'The Child's Right to Religious Freedom and Formation of Identity', (2007) International Journal of Children's Rights 15, 251-67.
• 'Supersized Speech – McLibel comes to Strasbourg', (2005) Cambridge Law Journal 64, 311-14.
• 'A dedicated follower of (religious) fashion', (2005) Cambridge Law Journal 64, 527-29.
• 'Miscarriage of Justice in the Criminal Process: Section 215 of the Criminal Procedure Law 1982', (2002) Alei Mishpat 2, 65-92 (in Hebrew).
• 'Satire and Parody in Copyright Law', (2000) Hamishpat, College of Management Law Review (in Hebrew).
• 'On the Relevance of Relevance to the Theory of Legal Factfinding', (2000) Israel Law Review 34, 260-301.
• 'Lifelike and lifeless in law: Do corporations have human rights?' (on SSRN)

Conferences

Recent conference presentations

• ?'Fertile soil? - Rationality, legitimacy and constitutional transplantations'. International conference on Constitutional Culture, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, co-sponsored by the Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University, October 2-3, 2015.