Abstract

Despite the efforts of some modern Jewish law scholars, it is difficult to apply models of secular jurisprudence (whether positivist or Dworkinian) to the Jewish legal system. Internal analysis suggests that the “secondary rules” of the system are far too fragile. Rather, the system appears to privilege trust over objectively determinable truth. (But perhaps trust is a concept to which greater attention should be paid also in secular jurisprudence, as a legal realism informed by semiotics might maintain.) The practical implications of this difference are here illustrated both from research on reform of Jewish marriage law and recent developments in the area of law and religion, in the wake of Archbishop Rowan Williams’ advocacy in 2008 of a model of “transformative accommodation”.