News Archive
Inaugural Antisemitism Conference Attracts a Wide Audience
03/21/2022
More than 200 people registered for the inaugural Law vs. Antisemitism Conference at the Robert H. McKinney School of Law on March 14-15.
Over two days, more than 50 presenters from more than 20 states in the U.S., plus Austria, Germany, Israel, England, and Luxembourg, engaged with audiences in the law school’s Wynne Courtroom and in virtual meetings on a multitude of topics, ranging from the definition of antisemitism to the view from the Midwest, hate speech and the First Amendment, critical race theory, and post-Holocaust litigation and reparations. Presenters included a wide representation of professions and disciplines, including practicing lawyers, judges, think tank leaders, community activists, rabbis, filmmakers, and scholars of history, political science, and Jewish studies.
The goal of the Conference was ambitious: to build a new field of legal study on the intersection between law and antisemitism, according to Robert Katz, IU McKinney professor of law and John S. Grimes Fellow, who convened the conference with Diane Klein, visiting professor of law at Southern University Law Center.
Katz and Klein are co-founders of the Law vs. Antisemitism Project to promote legal research and education on the relationship between law and antisemitism.
“There is no field of legal study that systematically researches the intersection of law and antisemitism,” Professor Katz said. “The handful of legal scholars who research antisemitism and the law work in isolation, and without a sense of being part of a larger scholarly project. There has never been an event that convened legal scholars who work on antisemitism-related topics
“This unprecedented outpouring of talent and interest in antisemitism as a legal phenomenon makes me optimistic that one day IU McKinney will be known as the place where the field of law and antisemitism studies was born,” he said.
Professor Katz wrote an op-ed published March 16 in The Indiana Lawyer on the topic, noting that recent events making headlines that “Antisemitism is more than a hatred or practice—it is a legal phenomenon, too.”
