In this 4-part series, Professor Oren Gross will look at the Balfour Declaration, Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the legal status of the Territories, and Refugees and the Right of Return.
Weekly, January 16, 24, 31 and February 7 | 7:00 – 8:00 pm
CLE credit eligible. No prior legal knowledge is required!
This series is free to attend, but registration is required. Register HERE.
Wednesday, January 16 | History: Balfour, Mandate, Partition, and Independence
November 2, 1917, Balfour Declaration is considered the classical starting point for legal analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The lecture will briefly examine each of the legal issues concerning some of the critical junctions on the road stretching between the Declaration and the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948.
1 Standard CLE Credit – Pending
Thursday, January 24 | Jerusalem
On December 6, 2017, President Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, explaining that,
“[t]his [was] nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done.” The United Nations General Assembly voted 128-9 (35 abstentions) to condemn the US plan. The lecture will look at the legal status of Jerusalem under international law recognizing that, as Justice Kennedy put it in Zivotofsky v. Kerry: “[q]uestions touching upon the history of [Jerusalem] and its present legal and international status are among the most difficult and complex in international affairs.”
1 Standard CLE Credit – Pending
Thursday, January 31 | The Territories
In this lecture, we will examine the legal status of the Territories. Questions of title play important role in determining how long Israel may continue to hold/occupy the land it captured during the Six Day War.
1 Standard CLE Credit – Pending
Thursday, February 7 | Refugees and the Right of Return
The legal issues underlying the Palestinian refugee problem have been a major source of contention among Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the Arab States. Over 5 million refugees are registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the specialized UN agency dedicated to the provision of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian refugees. The majority are refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants, while the rest are refugees and their descendants from the 1967 war. The Palestinians insist that any peace agreement with the State of Israel must include those refugees’ exercising their“ right of return” to the homes and lands they had lost. In this lecture, we will examine the nature of the claim for the right of return under international law.
1 Standard CLE Credit – Pending
Professor Oren Gross is the Irving Younger Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of international law and national security law. Professor Gross holds an LL.B. degree magna cum laude from Tel Aviv University, and LL.M. and S.J.D. degrees from Harvard Law School. He has taught and held visiting positions in numerous leading institutions such as Harvard Law School and Princeton University. Professor Gross’s work has been published extensively in leading academic journals such as the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law, to mention but two. His book, Law in Times of Crisis: Emergency Powers in Theory and Practice, was awarded the prestigious Certificate of Merit for Preeminent Contribution to Creative Scholarship by the American Society of International Law in 2007. His book, Guantanamo and Beyond: Exceptional Courts and Military Commissions in Comparative Perspective, was published in 2013. In 2017, Professor Gross was awarded the Stanley V. Kinyon Tenured Faculty of the Year Award, University of Minnesota Law School.
