Prof. Karin Carmit Yefet
- kyefet@univ.haifa.ac.il
- 04-8280791
- CV
- Official Website
- SSRN Homepage
Prof. Karin Carmit Yefet is an Associate Professor and a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Haifa. She is also a member of the Israel Young Academy as well as the Global Young Academy which includes the world’s top 200 young scientists in all disciplines. She earned her Master’s degree and a doctorate from Yale Law School as a Fulbright and Fischman scholar, and completed the LL.B. & LL.M. Honors program at Bar-Ilan University summa cum laude and first in her class. Her award-winning scholarship on family law and feminist legal theory focuses on the impact of religion on various dimensions of women’s life from feminist, comparative, and constitutional perspectives. She has also written extensively on issues pertaining to the family, the military, Orientalism (Mizrahi legal studies) and female sexuality.
Prof. Yefet clerked at the Israeli Supreme Court (for the Hon. Justice Jacob Türkel), served as a senior adviser to the State Committee for investigating Israel’s adherence to International Humanitarian Law, and advised the Israeli Ministry of Justice as well as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs on women’s rights issues, including with respect to the Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council.
Prof. Yefet was awarded numerous competitive grants and awards, including the BIU Provost’s prize (for three consecutive years), ,the Israel Bar Prize, The Israeli Parliament and the Israel Committee of University Heads prize, the University of Haifa Provost’s Prize for Best Junior Scholar, the Cegla Prize for Best Article, the Justice Cheshin Prize for Academic Excellence in Law (Hebrew University), the Dusty and Ettie Miller Prize for Outstanding Young Scholar (University of Haifa), The Zeltner Prize for Best Junior Scholar (Tel Aviv University), the Association for Israel Studies Early Career Award, the Israeli Sociology Society Award for Best Article, The Gorney Prize for Junior Scholars for the Best Article in Public Law, The Society For Medicine and Law Prize for Best Article, and an Outstanding Lecturer Award. Some of her articles have won international competitions, including those organized by the Harry Krause Emerging Family Law Scholars Workshop (twice), the Stanford-Pennsylvania International Junior Faculty Forum, and the University of Michigan Young Scholars’ Conference. Her article on the right to marital freedom was selected for the prestigious Constitutional Law Series as one of the world’s “most important and influential works” on gender in constitutional law.
- Family law
- Religion and the Law
- Sexuality, gender and the law
- Feminist legal theory
- Mizrahi (Oriental) Legal Studies
- Constitutional and human rights law
Articles
- Wejdan Hleihel, Ido Shahar, and Karin Carmit Yefet, Transforming “Transformative Accommodation”: Palestinian-Muslim Women’s Maintenance Suits as a Case Study, Law and Social Inquiry (forthcoming)
- Ido Shahar and Karin Carmit Yefet, Rethinking the Rethinking of Legal Pluralism: Toward a Manifesto for a Pluri-Legal Perspective, Law and History Review(2023)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, The Womb Monologues: Toward a Mizrahi Feminist Theory of Israeli Law, American Journal of Comparative Law (2022)
- Karin Carmit Yefet and Shahar Ido, Divorced from Citizenship: Palestinian-Christian Women between the Church and the Jewish State, Law & Social Inquiry, 1-41 (2022)
- Shahar Ido and Karin Carmit Yefet,“Kadijustiz in the Ecclesiastical Courts: Naming, Blaming, Reclaiming”, Law and Society Review, 56(1):53-77 (2022)
- Karin Carmit Yefet,Divorce as a Formal Gender-Equality Right, 22 Pa. J. Const. L. 793 (2020)
- Karin Carmit Yefet,Divorce as a Substantive Gender-Equality Right, 22 Pa. J. Const. L. 455 (2020)
- Noya Rimalt and Karin Carmit Yefet,Rethinking the Choice of “Private Choice” in Conceptualizing Abortion: A Reply to Chemerinsky and Goodwin’s Abortion: A Woman’s Private Choice, 95 L. Rev.See Also 133 (2016)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, Israeli Family Law as a Civil-Religious Hybrid: A Cautionary Tale of Fatal Attraction, 2016 Illinois. L. Rev.1505 (2016)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, Born to be a Mother: Anatomy, Autonomy, And Substantive Citizenship for Women in Israel, 39 Harvard .J L. & Gender257 (2016)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, Synagogue And State in the Israeli Military: A Story of “Inappropriate Integration”, 10Journal of Law & Ethics of Human Rights 223 (2016)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, Feminism and Hyper-Masculinity in Israel: A Case Study in Deconstructing Legal Fatherhood, 27 Yale J.L. & Feminism47 (2015)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, The Constitution And Female-Initiated Divorce in Pakistan: Western Liberalism in Islamic Grab, 34 J.L. & Gender 553 (2011)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, What’s The Constitution Got to Do With It? Regulating Marriage in Pakistan, 16 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol’y347 (2009)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, Unchaining The Agunot: Enlisting The Israeli Constitution in The Service of Women’s Marital Freedom, 20 Yale J.L. & Feminism441 (2009), reprinted in Gender and the Constitution (Mark Tushnet, Paul Craig & Catherine MacKinnon eds.)
- Karin Carmit Yefet,Lifting the Egyptian Veil: A Constitutional Road Map to Female Marital Emancipation in the Islamic World, 5 The Family in Law Journal 87 (2011) (selected for presentation by the International Society of Family Law)
Books
- The Turkel Festschrift: Studies In Theory, Philosophy And Law (Aharon Barak, Karin Carmit Yefet, Elyakim Rubinstein eds., 2020)
Book Chapters
- Karin Carmit Yefet and Ido Shahar, Islamic Law in the Jewish State: The Formation of an Israeli Sharia, in 50 The International Survey of Family Law (Robin Wilson and June Carbone eds, Cambridge: Intersentia, 2023)
- A Tale of Fragmentation and Intertwinement: Israeli Family Law Between the Sacred and the Secular, in The Contested Place of Religion in Family Life (Cambridge University Press, 2018) (with Arianne Renan Barzilay)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, The “Problem that Has No Name”: Giving Voice to Invisible Mothers-to-Be in Academia, in Motherhood in Science – How Children Change Our Careers29 (Global Young Academy, 2020)
Articles in Hebrew
- Karin Carmit Yefet and Yifat Bitton, Mizrahi Legal Studies: The Inauguration of a New Discipline, 23 University of Haifa Law Review 7
- Karin Carmit Yefet, A Voice of Her Own: Mizrahi Feminism in Israeli Law, 23 University of Haifa Law Review(2022) (in Hebrew)
- Wejdan Halihel, Karin Carmit Yefet, and Ido Shahar, The Muslim Wife Between the Israeli Shari’a Court and the Civil Family Court: A Conservative Revolution in Liberal Clothing, 52 Hebrew University Law Review(2023) (in Hebrew)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, Orientalism, Gender, and the Law: The Mizrahi M(O)ther as the Otherin Israeli Law and Society, 41 Tel-Aviv University Law Review 689 (2019)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, In the Name of the Mother: Rethinking Israel’s Separatist Pro-Natalist Policy,48 Hebrew University Law Review 512 (2019)
- Shulamit Almog & Karin Carmit Yefet, Sexuality, Gender and Law – Part II: Toward a Reconceptualization of Female Sexuality, 45(3) The Hebrew University Law Journal 653 (2016)
- Karin Carmit Yefet & Shulamit Almog, Religionization, Exclusion, and the Military: “Zero Motivation” in Gender Relations?, 39(2) Tel-Aviv University Law Review243 (2016)
- Shulamit Almog & Karin Carmit Yefe, Sexuality, Gender and Law – Part I: From Dyseconomic’s to Sexual Economics, 45(2)The Hebrew University Law Journal 385 (2015)
- Karin Yefet, Administrative Action: Its Birth, Life, and Premature Demise, 3 Ono Academic College Law Review591 (2003)
- J.S.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science), Yale Law School
- LL.M. (Master of Laws), Yale Law School
- LL.M., Honors program, summa cum laude (ranked 1st in class), Bar Ilan University
- LL.B., summa cum laude (ranked 1st in class), Bar Ilan University
- Karin Carmit Yefet, The Muslim Wife Between the Israeli Shari’a Court and the Civil Family Court: A Conservative Revolution in Liberal Clothingin the conference New Developments in The Accommodation of Religious Law in Modern States, 2022
- Karin Carmit Yefet, A Voice of One’s Own: Mizrahi Feminism in Israeli Abortion Law, Harvard Law School(December 10, 2019) (From 3:43 to 19:15)
- Karin Carmit Yefet, “The jurisprudence of Love”, at the E. David Fischman Scholarship
- Karin Carmit Yefet, recipient of the Dusty and Ettie Miller Fellowship
- Karin Carmit Yefet, The Curious Case of Israeli Family Law, at the University of Illinois College
- Karin Carmit Yefet, The Muslim Wife Between the Israeli Shari’a Court and the Civil Family Court: A Conservative Revolution in Liberal Clothing, Karin Carmit Yefet I New Developments in The Accommodation of Religious Law in Modern States (2022)
- Editor in Chief of Haifa Law Review
- Adviser to the State Commission Appointed to Investigate the Maritime Incident of May 31, 2010
- Member of the Yale Leadership Society (up to ten members are selected from the entire Yale student body)
- (Former) Editor of the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, the Yale Law and Policy Review, the Bar Ilan Law Review, and the Ono Academic College Law Review
- Worked at Plimpton & Debevoise, NY, USA and served as a reporter to the Institute for Transnational Arbitration (ITA) on behalf of the State of Israel
- Clerked at the Israel Supreme Court (chambers of the Hon. Justice Jacob Türkel) and at the Dr. Jacob Weinroth & Co. Law Office
