Editors
The editorial collective of The Nakba & The Law project includes:
Suhad Bishara, Director, Land & Planning Rights Unit, Adalah
Suhad is a senior lawyer with Adalah specializing in land and planning rights. She has worked with Adalah since 2001. From 1996-2001, she was a partner in a private law firm specializing in urban planning, and served as a legal consultant to the Association of Forty, the Arab Steering Committee for Urban Planning in the Galilee Society , and the Hotline for Battered Women. Suhad is also a former Chairperson of the Committee for Educational Guidance for Arab Students and a founder of Kayan – A Feminist Organization. She received an LL.B. in Law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993, and an LL.M. in Public Service Law from New York University’s School of Law (USA) in 2001. Suhad was the first Palestine & Law Fellow at Columbia University Law School (2014-2015).
Katherine Franke, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Katherine Franke directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University as well as the Open University Project, which promotes scholarship and discussion of Israel/Palestine. She was awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a leading scholar in the area of feminism, sexuality and race. Franke’s legal career began as a civil rights lawyer, first specializing in HIV discrimination cases and then race and sex cases more generally. In the last 25 years she has authored briefs in cases addressing HIV discrimination, forced sterilization, same-sex sexual harassment, gender stereotyping, and transgender discrimination in the U.S. Supreme Court and other lower courts. Franke is chair of the board of trustees of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Hassan Jabareen, Founder and Director General, Adalah
Hassan Jabareen has served as Adalah’s General and Legal Director since its establishment in 1996. He has 20 years of experience in litigating scores of landmark constitutional law cases before the Israeli Supreme Court on issues of discrimination, political rights, land rights, and economic and social rights on behalf of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as humanitarian cases involving the protection of Palestinian civilians living under occupation in the OPT. He is an Adjunct Lecturer for a course that he initiated on the legal status of the Arab minority in Israel in the Faculties of Law at Tel Aviv, Hebrew, and Haifa Universities since 1998. He has received several awards for outstanding public interest lawyering and top human rights law prizes. He has also published several academic articles in edited books and law reviews on the citizenship status of the Palestinians. Hassan was a Yale World Fellow in 2005-2006 and a Senior Robina Law Fellow at Yale Law School in 2012-2014.
Brinkley Messick, Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University
Brinkley Messick specializes in the anthropology of law, legal history, written culture, and the circulation and interpretation of Islamic law. He was a founding co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies (2010-2015) and remains part of CPS’ faculty collective. Messick is the author of The Calligraphic State (1993), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, and co-editor of Islamic Legal Interpretation (1996). He is at work on a book on the doctrine and court practice of Shari`a law in the pre-revolutionary twentieth-century Islamic state of highland Yemen. He is also interested in a critical review of anthropology’s early disinclination, as a matter of disciplinary identity, to deal with written sources. In 2009 he received the Outstanding Senior Scholar Award from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association.
