Introduction

Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor at Yeshiva University, Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, and Director of Yeshiva University’s Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization. She has held the Joseph P. and Caroline Zelaznik Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and also has visited at Princeton and Columbia Law School. She is a regular visitor at the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv Law Schools, where she teaches Jewish Law and Political Thought. Professor Stone’s publications include: “In Pursuit of the Counter-text: The Turn to the Jewish Legal Model in Contemporary American Legal Theory,” (Harvard Law Review); “The Jewish Conception of Civil Society,” in Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton University Press); “Feminism and the Rabbinic Conception of Justice” in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University); and “Rabbinic Legal Magic,” (Yale Journal of Law & Humanities). In Fall 2010, she will be delivering the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures at Yale University.