International Board Members

Sir Peter Roth is a judge of the High Court of England and Wales, and the former president of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. He was previously in legal practice as a barrister, specialising in competition and public law. He was a Visiting Professor at King’s College, University of London until his judicial appointment, and in 1987 a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of legal books and articles and President of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. He is the son of the late Dr Stephen Roth, in whose memory the Institute was established.

Yishai Blank is the Dean at the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law, and the Faculty’s former Vice Dean for Academic Affairs. His areas of research and teaching include Local Government Law, Administrative Law, Global Cities, Urban Legal Policy, Law and Secularism, and Legal Theory. Professor Blank obtained his LL.B. and an additional B.A in Philosophy (both magna cum laude) from Tel-Aviv University. He clerked for the Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, and practiced law in the leading law firm I. Gornitzky & Co. Professor Blank continued his studies at Harvard Law School, where he was a Byse Fellowship recipient, and where he received his LL.M. in 1999 and his S.J.D. in 2002. He was a member of the Young Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences Forum of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities, and he is a two-times recipient of prestigious fellowship from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF). Professor Blank is expected to be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the Fall 2017, and he has been a visiting professor in Cornell, Brown, University of Toronto (Canada), Queen’s University (Canada), Sciences Po Law School (Paris), Hamburg University (Germany), and the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Spain). Professor Blank’s works have been published in law journals in the United States and in Israel, including Stanford Law Review (forthcoming), Cornell Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Harvard Journal of International Law, Fordham Urban Law Journal, the Urban Lawyer, Tel-Aviv University Law Review, and Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Sir Andrew Burns was British Ambassador to Israel from 1992-1995 and is currently Strategic Adviser to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). From 2010 to 2015 he was the United Kingdom Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, and in 2014/15 Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). He is Chair of Oasis of Peace UK, the British Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam in Israel; and, having earlier chaired the Anglo-Israel Association, he now leads a programme of biennial Anglo-Israel Colloquia on policy issues. He was British Consul-General in Hong Kong from 1997-2000 and British High Commissioner to Canada from 2000-2003. His earlier diplomatic postings were to India, Romania and the United States.

Menachem Fisch holds the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Chair for History and Philosophy of Science, and is Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Kogod Center for the Renewal of Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. He is former Chair of the Graduate School of Philosphy at Tel Aviv University, former President of the Israel Society for History and Philosophy of Science, former Chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science at the Israel Academy of Science. He has held visiting research positions at Queen’s College, Oxford, Trinity College, Cambridge, The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Dibner Institute for Advanced Study in the History of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Collegium Budapest. Menachem Fisch is Chair of the Cohn Institute’s Board and Academic Committee, and serves as Co-Editor of the newly established HOPOS, The Journal of the International Society for the History of the Philosophy of Science.

Prof. Martin Goodman is Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. He has been a Fellow of the Oxford Centre of Hebrew and Jewish Studies since 1986 and served as President of the Centre from 2014-18. Trained in Oxford as a classicist and a lecturer in ancient history in the University of Birmingham from 1977-86, he was appointed to the Readership in Jewish Studies in Oxford in 1991, and has published extensively on both Jewish and Roman history. His scholarly books for general readers include Rome and Jerusalem: the clash of ancient civilizations (Penguin, 2007) and A History of Judaism (Penguin, 2017). His work on relations between communities and religions in antiquity over many years is reflected in studies such as his book Mission and Conversion: proselytizing in the religious history of the Roman empire (Oxford, 1994) and his contributions to Apologetics in the Roman Empire: pagans, Jews, and Christians (Oxford, 1999). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996.

Professor Sir Jeffrey Jowell KC is a practicing lawyer at Blackstone Chambers. He is Emeritus Professor of Public Law at University College London (where he was twice Dean of the Law Faculty and a Vice Provost). He was knighted (KCMG) in the Queen's Honours List 2011 "for services to human rights, democracy and the rule of law". Jowell served as the Director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law since its launch in December 2010. He has also acted as constitutional advisor to a number of national governments in the Commonwealth, Asia and currently, in the Middle East, including assisting with the constitutions and public law of South Africa, Jersey, Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands and the Maldives. From 2000—2011 Jeffrey served as the UK's member on the Council of Europe's Commission for Democracy through Law (The Venice Commission).

Philip J. Kessler, co-founding partner of Hoffman & Kessler LLP, has decades of experience in successfully handling and trying a wide range of important and high stakes commercial and intellectual property cases throughout the United States in the federal and state trial and appellate courts and in arbitration. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers where he served on its Board of Regents and Executive Committee. He is also a Fellow of the International Society of Barristers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers. Phil is a Life Member of the Judicial Conference of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; a Life Fellow of the American and Michigan State Bar Foundations; Trustee, Executive Committee member and Secretary of the US Supreme Court Historical Society; a Development Board member of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law in London, England and US Chair and President of the Bingham Centre's US affiliate, The International Rule of Law Project, Inc.

Prof. Hanna Lerner is an associate professor in political science and the former Head of the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs. Her research focuses on comparative constitution writing, particularly in societies divided over the vision of their state, religion and politics, democratic theory and on global justice and international labor rights. She received her BA in philosophy and history and her MA in philosophy (magna cum laude) from Tel-Aviv University. She earned her MPhil and PhD in political science from Columbia University, New York. Dr. Lerner is the author of Making Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Global Justice and International Labour rights (with Yossi Dahan and Faina Milman-Sivan, Cambridge University Press, 2016) and of Constitution Writing, Religion and Democracy (with Asli Bali, Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her articles appeared in numerous books and in journals including Law and Social Inquiry, World Politics, Michigan Journal of International Law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Constellations, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Social Philosophy, Cornell International Law Journal. She had also co-edited a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on religion and constitutionalism. In 2014 she co-convened a research group on constitutionalism, religion and human rights at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University, Germany. Dr. Lerner also held visiting fellowships at Princeton University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Before joining Tel Aviv University she served as deputy director of the School of Educational Leadership at the Mandel Institute in Jerusalem. She also has vast experience as a journalist and radio news editor, and was the founding-director of the news department of Radio Darom.

Martin Paisner attended St Paul’s School, London (1956-1961), the Sorbonne, Paris (1961-1962), WorcesterCollege, Oxford (1962-1965) and the Universityof Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA (1966-1967). He obtained an MA from Oxfordand an LLM from Michiganand holds an Honorary PhD from Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Martin qualified as a solicitor in January 1970 and became a partner with Paisner & Co in 1972 (that firm having merged with Berwin Leighton to form Berwin Leighton Paisner in May 2001). He is now a partner in Payne Hicks Beach. He has specialised throughout his career in the areas of charity law and private client practice.

Dr. Robert Schwarcz, Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland (USA), is an internationally renowned neuroscientist, who has pioneered the study of molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. The nephew of the late Dr. Stephen Roth, Dr. Schwarcz has been active in Jewish affairs since his youth and provides substantive academic as well as familial perspectives to the Board.

Amir Teicher is an assistant professor of history at Tel Aviv University. Written under the supervision of Prof. Shula Volkov and Prof. Eva Jablonka, his thesis was on “The Impact of Mendel’s Theories on the Humanistic Sciences in Germany, 1900-1936.” Since then, Amir has completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University’s Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. Amir’s research interests include the study of Nazism, the development of scientific methods in modern Europe and their influence on the social sciences, the history of biological thought, and the connection between statistical and visual methods of analysis. Through his historical work, Amir seeks to understand the development of scientific methods in their cultural contexts and to highlight the dynamic relationship between the concept of expert knowledge and its influence on interpretations of human nature and society. Amir Teicher is a lecturer in TAU's Department of History.

Rachel Gali Cinamon is Full Professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel where she serves as the head of the Career Development Lab, and as the Dean of faculty of Humanities. Born and raised in Israel. Her research interests focus on career development of women, minorities and at risk populations, work-family relations through the life span, future plans and perceptions, and career interventions. Her research group involves with several university-community partnerships that focus on career interventions in high schools and in civic organizations. She has led many funded research and projects, including a special and unique career intervention model that emphasizes the importance of being involved in four major roles in order to increase wellbeing and life satisfaction: work, family, community, and leisure. Her work is driven by her deep commitment to human development and by her belief in social responsibility to individuals’ health, wellbeing and meaningful life. She is a mother of three children, a spouse, a friend and a long distance runner.