
Assaf LikhovskiTel Aviv University | TAU · Faculty of Law
Assaf Likhovski
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Publications (64)
מאמר המאפיין את אופי מחקריו ההיסטוריים של יורם שחר במסגרת כנס שנערך לכבודו בשנת 2022
This article discusses works on jurisprudence produced by authors from three British-ruled territories (India, Egypt, and Palestine) in the early decades of the twentieth century. It argues that these works were part of a non-Western jurisprudential wave that appeared in different parts of the British Empire at the time. Legal scholars working in t...
This is a book review of Michal Shaked's biography of Israeli Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch
The life of the Jewish-Russian-Latvian-American legal scholar Max Laserson was punctuated by emigration and exile. This article explores the impact that this experience had on his scholarship. While Laserson’s audience and research topics changed as he moved from place to place, his origins as both a Jew and a native of Latvia, a borderland region...
This is a book review of Alexander Kaye's book The Invention of Jewish Theocracy
This chapter analyzes the history of constitutionalism in Palestine during the late-Ottoman and British-colonial periods, showing that many of the main features of Israeli constitutional law have long-forgotten pre-state origins. Following a brief Introduction to the chapter, Section II discusses official constitutional texts produced during the la...
In this Article, I examine jurisprudence textbooks and related works written in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the jurisprudential works from India were not merely summaries of the leading English books, but were different from English works in three senses. First, the gap between English theories and In...
In many constitutions, constitutional duties appear alongside constitutional rights. However, the history of constitutional duties, unlike the history of constitutional rights, is a neglected topic. This article is a case study of the history of constitutional duties in Israel. The article documents the appearance of duties in Israeli constitutiona...
מאמר זה סוקר שמונה מגמות עכשוויות בחקר ההיסטוריה האינטלקטואלית של המשפט. הוא שואל האם ניתן לאתר מגמות דומות גם במחקרים העוסקים בהיסטוריה של המשפט העברי. על ידי השוואת ההתפתחויות בחקר היסטוריה האינטלקטואלית של המשפט ובחקר המשפט העברי, המאמר מצביע על כמה מן ההישגים וכמה מן הלאקונות בחקר המשפט העברי כיום, ומדגיש כמה מן המאפיינים הייחודיים המבדילים בין...
In the early decades of the twentieth century, a group of Jewish legal scholars working in Eastern Europe, and later in Mandatory Palestine, sought to « revive » (i.e., modernize) Jewish law and turn it into the legal system of the Jewish community in Palestine—and later the legal system of the State of Israel. Inspired by the nationalist legal ide...
This chapter of The Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research identifies some recent trends in historiography generally, and in the study of intellectual history. The chapter discusses the relevance of these trends to the study of the intellectual history of law, referring to relevant legal history works reflecting these trends, noting existing...
Some of the founding fathers of Israel's legal system were lawyers educated in Polish law schools. What was the impact of this background on their legal thought? There are few explicit references to Polish law in Israeli legal texts. However, indirectly, legal and constitutional ideas taken from Polish law did appear in Israeli law. This article fo...
This article identifies eight recent, and relatively recent, trends in the study of the intellectual history of law. It asks whether these trends also appear in works dealing with the history of Jewish law. By comparing developments in the study of the intellectual history of law and the study of Jewish law, this article points to some of the achie...
This essay on Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 (2014) focuses on the relationship between certain minorities and the law of the state. It seeks to expand the discussion found in Sharafi's book in three directions: first, by comparing the attitude of Parsis in South Asia to the law of the state...
This book describes how a social-norms model of taxation rose and fell in British-ruled Palestine and the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Such a model, in which non-legal means were used to foster compliance, appeared in the tax system created by the Jewish community in 1940s Palestine and was later adopted by the new Israeli state in...
In the late 1930s and 1940s, the Jews of British-ruled Palestine established an informal system of direct and indirect taxation. This system, which raised large amounts of money, was similar in some senses to a charity and in other senses to a governmental tax system. This paper provides an outline of the history of this system and some of its uniq...
This is the second book symposium of the first issue of The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies. The symposium consists of a discussion of David Rabban’s forthcoming "Law’s History: Late Nineteenth-Century American Legal Scholarship and the Transatlantic Turn to History". It includes critical comments by Dr. Adam Hofri-Winogradow, Prof. Ron Harris, P...
:In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of historians and sociologists revolutionized the study of Israeli history. These scholars, often called collectively the Post-Zionists, sought to undermine "the founding myths of Israel". The Post-Zionist paradigm has made important and lasting contributions to the understanding of Israeli history, but no historiog...
Tax law is a technical area of law which does not seem to be culturally specific. It is thus seen as easily transferable between different societies and cultures. However, tax law is also based on definitions and notions which are not universal (the private sphere, the family, the gift etc.). So, is tax law universal or particular? Is it indeed eas...
This article discusses the use of arguments about “culture” in two debates about the imposition, application and abolition of income tax law: A debate about the transplantation of British income taxation to British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, and a debate about tax privacy in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century...
This Article tells the story of two legal cooperation projects established by the Israeli Ministry of Justice in the 1950s and 1960s. The Article argues that the history of these projects can suggest a new way of understanding the process of legal transplantation. Much of the literature on legal transplants focuses on the legal norms transplanted....
This paper examines the attempt of some Jewish nationalists to create a Jewish legal system in early 20th century Palestine. Like many nationalist movements, Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement, sought to revive its cultural past. The best known aspect of Zionist cultural activity was the revival of the Hebrew language, but linguistic revival...
Do the attempts of modern states to foster tax compliance reflect wider attributes of modernity? This article analyzes the history of the creation of a tax compliance culture in Israel of the 1950s and the various practices, techniques, and discourses that were deployed by the state to create model taxpaying citizens. It shows how the specific hist...
One of the major questions facing the world today is the role of law in shaping identity and in balancing tradition with modernity. In an arid corner of the Mediterranean region in the first decades of the twentieth century, Mandate Palestine was confronting these very issues. This book examines the legal history of Palestine, showing how law and i...
אסף לחובסקי מנתח את ההיסטוריה של הציות לדיני המס בישראל של שנות החמישים ואת האמצעים, הטכניקות והשיח ששימשו את המדינה החדשה ליצירת אזרחים משלמי מס. הוא מראה כיצד קשורה ההיסטוריה של יצירת הציות לדיני המס לתופעה רחבה יותר: השאיפה של המדינה המודרנית ליצור אזרחים "נורמליים", שמפקחים על עצמם ומצייתים לחוק ללא צורך באיום בסנקציות משפטיות. יצירת תרבות של צ...
This festschrift article describes two projects inspired by Morton Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Transformation I). Both projects tell the story of the transformation of Transformation I, as it migrated to non-American legal contexts and as its historiographical questions and interpretations were transformed due to the en...
At certain moments in Israel's legal history, Jewish lawyers were forced to choose between their commitment to the professional interests of their guild and their commitment to Jewish nationalism. This dilemma was especially apparent in the debates surrounding what can be called the failed Jewish legal revolution of 1948, when Israeli lawyers had t...
It has been argued that the decisions of the House of Lords on tax avoidance in the early decades of the 20th century, and specifically the Westminster case decided in 1935, should be viewed as an expression of an ideological bias in favor of wealthy taxpayers. This article claims that another possible way to understand judicial reactions to tax av...
This paper explores the relationship between Eugen Ehrlich's work and other fin de siecle thinkers in order to gain a better understanding of the intellectual and cultural context from which Ehrlich's thought emerged. The starting point of the paper is Venus in Furs, a novella published by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in 1870. Masoch's...
This chapter presents the story of Gregory v. Helvering, 293 U.S. 465 (1935), the leading case in defining tax avoidance and one of the most cited tax cases ever. Using unpublished judicial memoranda, briefs, newspaper reports and other sources, the chapter reconstructs the history of the case in the lower courts and in the Supreme Court. It descri...
This article provides a comparative history of the definition of income in British, British-colonial and American tax legislation from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The article argues that the 200-year history of the legislative definition of income can be divided into three distinct stages. At each stage the definition of...
Courts play a major role in fighting tax avoidance, but there are very few studies that attempt to explain the historical development of anti-avoidance doctrines. One rare exception has been a study of the history of British anti-avoidance doctrines in the first part of the 20th century that has argued that British judges adopted a formalist, pro-t...
Tax avoidance is one of the major problems that every tax system faces. Courts play an important role in fighting tax avoidance, but the scope of judicial intervention in tax avoidance schemes varies. Certain courts and judges adopt a more passive and formalist attitude to tax avoidance while other courts pursue a more active, substantive approach....
בעוד שבתחומי חיים אחרים - בטחוניים, מדיניים, כלכליים, התיישבותיים וחברתיים - הקים היישוב היהודי בתקופת המנדט תשתית יישובית ניכרת, לקראת הרגע של הקמת המדינה, הרי שעיקר הקיים בתחום המשפטי היה מדינתי-בריטי ולא קהילתי-יהודי. אמנם התקיימו בתקופה זו מערכת משפט דתית-רבנית, "משפט שלום" עברי-לאומי וולונטרי ו"משפט חברים" הסתדרותי, אך אלו לא אומצו על-ידי הזרמ...
Attending to an underdeveloped lacuna in Weber's sociology of law, this essay examines the relationship between Protestant theology and the emergence of modern, rational legal systems. The essay argues that radical Protestantism inspired demands for the rationalization of English law, and while not successful in bringing about the concrete changes...
My story is full of holes. The first hole, or rather, ditch, was dug in 1930 by the municipality of Haifa. An Arab, Dr. Caesar Khoury, fell into the ditch and fractured his shoulder-blade.
Could Dr. Khoury recover? The law of torts of mandatory Palestine was found in the Mejelle — an Ottoman code of Moslem civil law. Did the Mejelle provide a remed...