Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
Noura Erakat
Erakat's landmark study of how international law has both served and failed the Palestinian struggle — and what it would take to make law a tool of liberation.
Why has international law, invoked so often on behalf of the Palestinians, delivered so little? Noura Erakat’s answer is neither faith nor despair but analysis. Across five critical junctures — from the Balfour Declaration and the early Mandate, through the 1967 war and the entrenchment of occupation, to the first intifada, the Oslo process, and the wars on Gaza — she shows how law has been made and remade by politics: sometimes an instrument of domination that legitimizes dispossession, sometimes a resource that Palestinian lawyers and activists have seized to advance liberation. The title’s phrase, “justice for some,” names a legal order that extends protection selectively. Yet the law’s meaning, Erakat insists, is not fixed. Legal work can serve emancipation only when it is harnessed to a clear political program and a mass movement — a tool of struggle, not a substitute for one. The result is a landmark of critical legal scholarship, written with a practitioner’s urgency.
About the author
Noura Erakat is a Palestinian American human rights attorney and scholar. She is a professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya, and an editorial committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Details
- Published by Stanford University Press, 2019
- ISBN 9780804798259
The edition
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Connected in the archive
14 connected records14 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
named in this record — 3 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Intifada
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …Across five critical junctures — from the Balfour Declaration and the early Mandate, through the 1967 war and the entrenchment of occupation, to the first intifada, the Oslo process, and the wars on Gaza — she shows how law has been made and remade by politics: sometimes an instrument of domination that legitimizes dispossession, sometimes a resource that…
- Noura Erakatنورة عريقات
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Why has international law, invoked so often on behalf of the Palestinians, delivered so little? Noura Erakat's answer is neither faith nor despair but analysis.
- The Balfour Declaration
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …Across five critical junctures — from the Balfour Declaration and the early Mandate, through the 1967 war and the entrenchment of occupation, to the first intifada, the Oslo process, and the wars on Gaza — she shows how law has been made and remade by politics:…
on a related subject — 11 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Al-Haq — Defending Human Rights in Palestine
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "international law".
- Anatomy of a Genocide — report of the Special Rapporteur (A/HRC/55/73)
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "international law".
- BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "international law".
- Critical observations on the Amnesty International genocide report — Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "international law".
- Diana Buttuديانا بطو
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "international law".
- Francesca Albanese: 'Anatomy of a Genocide' and the Reports of the UN Special Rapporteur
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "international law".
- and 5 more
Cite this page
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- Chicago
“Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/library/justice-for-some/.- MLA
“Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/library/justice-for-some/. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-justice-for-some, title = {Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/library/justice-for-some/}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }