On Monday 27 February 2006 Professor Ruth Gavison, Senior Advisor to the Knesset Constitution Committee, will be speaking on "Fighting Terror in a Democracy" from 12 noon.
Prof Ruth Gavison, one of Israel’s leading scholars of public law, is Senior Advisor to the Knesset Constitution Committee, with responsibility for guiding the Committee in drafting the first-ever constitution for the State of Israel. She is the founder and director of Metzilah: Center for Humanistic, Liberal, Jewish, and Zionist Thought, which is dedicated to research and writing on the central aspects of Jewish national self-determination. Among her areas of expertise are: Legal theory, human rights, judicial discretion, religion and state, democratic theory, constitutionalism, and civil society.
Gavison was born in 1945 in Jerusalem. She earned her LL.B., LL.M., and B.A. in Philosophy and Economics from the Hebrew University and her D.Phil. from Oxford. Since 1969 Gavison has taught in the law faculty of the Hebrew University, where she holds the Haim H. Cohn Chair in Human Rights beginning in 1984 and became a full professor in 1990. Gavison has also been a visiting Professor at Yale and USC and a fellow of the Institute for Human Values in Princeton. Gavison is a long time member of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, where she served as Chairperson on alternate years from 1976-1994 and President from 1996-1999. She was a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute from 1997 through 2003. She is a member of the International Commission of Jurists since 1998.
Gavison won the 1997 Zeltner Prize for Legal Research, the Jerusalem Toleration prize in 2002, and the EMET prize in Law in 2003. Among the books she has authored are: Human Rights in Israel (1995), The Constitutional Revolution: A Reality or a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? (1998), Israel: A Jewish and Democratic State (1999) and (with others) Judicial Activism For and Against: The Role of the Supreme Court in Israeli Society (2000). She has edited or co-edited five books, including Issues in Contemporary Legal Philosophy: The Influence of H.L.A. Hart (1986) and Human Rights in Israel: A Reader (3 vols., 1992). In 2003 she published, with R. Yaacov Medan, A New Covenant on State and Religion Issues among Jews in Israel, for which they won the AviHai prize in 2001.
Discussion Meetings take place at Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, WC2R 3DX. This meeting will take place in the Fifth Floor meeting room. Please notify Kathleen James at james@iiss.org or tel +44 (0)20 7395 9109 if you would like to attend. 
