
University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization
Professor of Law
Director, Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization
Education
B.A., 1974, Princeton University
J.D., 1978, Columbia University
Areas of Expertise
Bio
Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. She has held the Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at both the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, and also has visited at Princeton, Columbia Law, Hebrew University Law, and Tel Aviv Law. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University Law School and was a Danforth Fellow in 1974 in Jewish History and Classical Religions at Yale University. Before joining the Cardozo faculty, Stone clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. In addition to teaching courses in Jewish Law and Political Thought and Jewish Law and American Legal Theory, she currently teaches Federal Courts and Law, Religion and the State.
Professor Stone is the co-editor-in-chief of Diné Israel, a peer review journal of Jewish law, co-edited with Tel Aviv Law School. She is also on the editorial boards of the Jewish Quarterly Review and of Hebraic Political Studies. She is a member of the board of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, the Center for Ethics of Yeshiva University, and the International Summer School in Religion and Public Life.
Professor Stone writes and lectures on the intersection of Jewish thought, legal theory, and the humanities. Her 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). Her work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Publications
"Between Revenge and Reconciliation: Rabbinic Perspectives on Collective Justice and Mercy," Azure (forthcoming)
"Law Without Nation or Law Without State: The Case of Halakha" in Law Without Nation, ed. Austin Sarat (forthcoming)
“Jewish Marriage and Secular Law,” The Islamic Marriage Contract (Harvard University Press) (forthcoming)
Preface, Dine Israel 24 (2007)
"Text, Tradition, and Reason in Comparative Perspective," Symposium Volume: (editor and introduction, co-authored with Adam Seligman), 28 Cardozo Law Review 1 (October 2006)
“Formulating Responses to Egalitarianism,” Jewish Law and Egalitarianism (Jason Aronson Press, 2005)
'Orthodoxy and the Public Square of Ideas,' Tradition vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 2004)
“Truth and Illusion,” Jewish Quarterly Review, vol.94, No.1 (Winter, 2004)
'A Jewish Perspective on Human Rights,' Society 41, No. 2 (Jan/Feb 2004)
'Spinoza's Identity and Philosophy: Jewish or Otherwise? 25 Cardozo Law Review 579 (2003)
“Tolerance versus Pluralism in Judaism,” Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 2,
“Tolerance and Pluralism in the Jewish Tradition”, in Religious Perspectives on Tolerance, Forum Bosnia, Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, ed. (2001)
“Cultural Pluralism, Nationalism, and Universal Rights,” 21 Cardozo Law Review 1211 (2000)
“What Do American Jews Believe?” Symposium, Commentary Magazine (August 1996)
“Justice, Mercy, and Gender in Rabbinic Thought,” 8 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 139 (1996)
'Judaism and Postmodernism,' 14 Cardozo Law Review 1681 (1993)
'The Transformation of Prophecy,' 4 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 167 (1992).
'Sinaitic and Noahide Law: Legal Pluralism in Jewish Law,' 12 Cardozo Law Review 1157 (1991)
Note, "The Preclusive Effect of State Court Judgments on Subsequent § 1983 Actions," 78 Columbia Law Review 610 (1978)
