Professor Eugene Kontorovich and International Law Pertaining to Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                                                

An international lawyer that is outstanding in standing up for Israel is Professor Eugene Kontorovich, born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1975.  

 Eugene Kontorovich moved to the US with his parents at the age of three. He immigrated to Israel in 2013 with his wife and four children, and lived in the Alon Shvut settlement.  Alon Shvut is an Israeli settlement located southwest of Jerusalem, one kilometer northeast of Kfar Etzion, in the West Bank. Established in June 1970 in the heart of the Etzion bloc, Alon Shvut became the prototype for Jewish communities in the region.  Travel time to Jerusalem is approximately 15 minutes.. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law, but the Israeli government disputes this.   

Kontorovich studied law at the University of Chicago, and began teaching there at age of 26. He later clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 2011, he received a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was later awarded the Federalist Society's Bator Award, given annually to a young scholar under 40.                                   

From 2011 to 2018, Kontorovich worked as a professor at Northwestern University.  Eugene Kontorovich teaches constitutional law at Northwestern University and heads the international law department of the Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem.   He specializes in constitutional and international law. He is a leading expert on the legal issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and has advised top officials and government departments in both the US and Israel. He is widely cited and published in popular media, such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, AP, Reuters, Commentary, Haaretz, and more. His scholarship has been cited in pathbreaking international law cases around the world. He attended college, law school, and taught at the University of Chicago, and clerked for Judge Richard Posner. Among his professional honors are a membership at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ, and the Bator Award from the Federalist Society.

 Since then he has served as a Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School.The Antonin Scalia Law School is the professional graduate law school of George Mason University. It is located in Arlington, Virginia, roughly 4 miles west of Washington, D.C., and 15 miles east-northeast of George Mason University's main campus in Fairfax.                                  

Kontorovich is a proponent of using anti-BDS laws to combat the BDS movement. He has helped many US states draft such legislation. In 2016, Kontorovich served as an expert advisor to the group that sued the American Studies Association over its 2013 decision to boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Here's Kontorovich being interviewd by Rabbi Golub, my favorite rabbis on the internet.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elaG8xSle14. He's returning to Israel.   Believe me, this statement he makes is very important.  Rabbi Golub is the best of interviewers, and asks the tough questions.  He's also a defender of Israel, but he hears the tough questions.  

Here's the beginning of Kontorovich's article on Free Speech:  

The free and open exchange of views—especially politically conservative or traditionally religious ones—is being challenged. This is taking place not just at college campuses but throughout our public spaces and cultural institutions. James Watson was fired from the lab he led since 1968 and could not speak at New York University because of petty, censorious students who would not know DNA from LSD. Our nation’s founders and heroes are being “disappeared” from public commemoration, like Trotsky from a photograph of Soviet rulers.

                                                                        

These attacks on “free speech” are not the result of government action. They are not what the First Amendment protects against. The current methods—professional and social shaming, exclusion, and employment termination—are more inchoate, and their effects are multiplied by self-censorship. A young conservative legal scholar might find himself thinking: “If the late Justice Antonin Scalia can posthumously be deemed a ‘bigot’ by many academics, what chance have I?”

Resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0Ya7063_nw 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kontorovich

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/eugene-kontorovich/

https://www.commentary.org/author/eugene-kontorovich/

https://www.jpost.com/author/eugene-kantorovich