Prof. Reuven Y. Hazan is a professor in and former chair of the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is the first to hold the Chair in Israeli Democracy and Politics. He has taught about Israeli government and comparative politics for almost thirty years, both at the Hebrew University and at American universities such as Columbia, Emory, Harvard and Yale. His research and publications focus on the neo-institutional cornerstones of comparative politics: political parties and party systems, elections and electoral systems, and legislative studies. He served on the editorial board of leading political science journals (International Political Science Review, Party Politics, Journal of Legislative Studies) and on the executive committee of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).

He has written and edited several books, special issues of journals, and dozens of book chapters and articles, covering both Israeli government and politics as well as more general theoretical and comparative political science scholarship. Hazan's most recent publications are as lead editor of the Oxford Handbook on Israeli Politics and Society and co-author of Politics and Government in Israel. He has served on political reform commissions appointed in Israel and in other countries, he has advised Israeli political parties and the speaker of the Israeli parliament, worked as a senior research fellow at Israel's top political think tanks, and his analysis of Israeli politics appears often in media outlets across the world (such as the New York Times and CNN).

A Jewish People Policy Institute senior fellow, who is part of the management team of the Thin Constitution project. Giladi has served as a magistrate court judge in Israel's Southern District. He was a legal assistant to the late Supreme Court Deputy President Eliahu Mazza, and an intern of former Supreme Court Deputy President Shlomo Levin.

Giladi was in charge of the professional team of the State's Committee of Inquiry on the Treatment of the Evacuees from the 2005 Gaza Disengagement. He has also served as a Senior Manager of Administrative Law Division in the National Public Defender's Office; a lawyer in the High Court of Justice (Bagatz) Department in the Office of the Attorney General; the Executive Director of the Clinical Law Programs at Tel Aviv University; and a Board Member at the Bar Association's Lawyers Training Institute. He has published several articles on the interface between public law and criminal law.

Ariel L. Bendor is Frank Church Professor of Legal Research at the Faculty of Law and Dean of School of Graduate Studies, Bar-Ilan University. He holds an LL.B. (cum laude) and an LL.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a professor or visiting scholar at Yale, Osgood Hall, and Maryland law schools. He served as a member of the appointments committee of Bar-Ilan University and as chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Law. He serves as the head of the Center for Media and the Law and of the publishing house of the Faculty of Law. Before joining Bar-Ilan in 2008, he was on the faculty at the University of Haifa (1992-2008), where he served as Dean of Law, Dean of Students, and member of the Board of Directives at the University of Haifa. He served in a number of public committees, including the Advisory Committee for Examination of Israel's Policy of Immigration, a team to examine the policy of issuing gag orders, and the search committee for the State Attorney. His main expertise includes constitutional law, administrative law, and substantive and procedural criminal law. He has written three scholarly books and about 80 academic articles published in law reviews and books in Israel and abroad. He has edited two books as well as the Hebrew University Law Review and the University of Haifa Law & Government Journal, and was the Editor in Chief of the University of Haifa Press.

We are happy to announce that Prof. Yehonatan Givati has joined the Institute as a senior fellow. Givati completed both his PhD in economics and his Doctorate in law (SJD) at Harvard and is a professor of law at Hebrew University. He is the founding director of the Aumann-Fischer Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Hebrew University and a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality, also at Hebrew University. Givati will head JPPI’s “Israel-Diaspora Index” project.