Prof. Ely Aaronson

Ely Aaronson is an Associate Professor, Vice Dean, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Law, Crime, and Society at the University of Haifa, Faculty of Law. His scholarship employs historical, sociological, and comparative perspectives to explore the political underpinnings and social consequences of criminalization and penal policies. His first book From Slave Abuse to Hate Crime: The Criminalization of Racial Violence in American History (Cambridge University Press 2014; paperback ed. 2019) examines the role played by debates about the criminalization of racial violence in enabling and constraining broader struggles for racial justice throughout American history. His recent work has examined the historical transformation of patterns of transnational governance of criminal justice policies from the late nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the interactions between transnational/transcolonial and domestic criminalization processes in the field of drug policy. His articles have appeared in leading peer review journals, including American Journal of Comparative Law, Annual Review of Criminology, the British Journal of Criminology, Law and Social Inquiry, and Regulation & Governance. He is the co-editor (with Gregory Shaffer) of Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice (Cambridge University Press 2020; paperback ed. 2022), and of a symposium on Drug Legalization, Decriminalization and International Law (American Journal of International Law Unbound, 2020).

Prof. Aaronson is a graduate of the London School of Economics (PhD, 2010), NYU (LL.M, 2004), Tel Aviv University (MA in political theory, sumna cum laude, 2005), and the University of Haifa (LL.B, magna cum laude, 2000). He held visiting research and teaching positions at UC Berkeley (Center for the Study of Law and Society), Sydney Institute of Criminology, London School of Economics, and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London). At the University of Haifa, he teaches courses in the fields of comparative legal history, sociology of criminal law, law & globalization, and socio-legal theory. He also served as the academic supervisor of the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic.