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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