S1744552315000191jra 361..378

Attributing a great deal of attention to global and local knowledge, this paper is focused on law and society scholarship that has been published by Israelis, both Jewish and Arab-Palestinians. It attempts to unveil and to map some of the major issues that have characterised the scholarly debates and intellectual discourse, primarily critical questions on law and political power, the nation-state, legal rights discourse and equality. More specifically, the paper analyses socio-legal research on various local issues, such as multiculturalism and national rifts on the backdrop of the 1967 military occupation alongside the emergence of a neoliberal capitalist economy. The protracted ArabPalestinian–Israeli conflict and the fragmentation of the political partisan map in Israel have incited more emphasis on the place of the Israeli Supreme Court, primarily sitting as a High Court of Justice, in public life as an important regulatory institution. This focus on the judicial power of the Court has resulted in an even more frantic controversy on whether the Court has become too engaged in political affairs. In all the law and society debates, local concepts and global knowledge have been intertwined. Hence, the paper enables scholars around the world to closely examine law and society scholarship on the convergence of local and global knowledge. I. Prologue of setting the stage This paper aims to offer an in-depth outlook into the academic research that scholars in Israel have produced on law and society. Based on analysis of hundred of studies on law and society written by Israelis that have been published since the 1950s, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, it unveils the fruitful scholarship of Israelis as articulation, construction and generation of conflicts around the meaning of the nation-state and its relations with various segments of society from ruling elites to marginalised communities. I have preferred not to analyse the genealogy of studies on law and society along recognisable lines of theory vs. empiricism or positivism and formalism vs. realism. Rather, the paper endeavours to unveil how scholarship on law and society resonates with struggles around division of political power, defining and redefining the nation-state, and contradictory expectations of construction and reconstruction of public policies. These struggles and conflicts of identities have formed and shaped distinctive types of research questions, theories and methodologies, which cannot exclusively be explained as an upshot of academic training; rather, scholars have been affected through a range of visions and concepts of the nation-state. Furthermore, to explore scholarship only based on affiliations with identity groups will not suffice. This paper aims to unveil a more compound map of research that looks mainly into the origins of how various scholars view the nation-state, and the ways in which local and global types of knowledge have converged to formulate interactions of research with social