C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Legal anthropology; law and religion; religious diversity in a secular context; Private Law; Israeli Law
Research Area(s)
Europe; Israel
Profile
Igal Lavi is a PhD candidate in Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He is part of the research group ‘Transformations in Private Law: Culture, Climate, and Technology’, led by Prof Mareike Schmidt.
Lavi is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of law, religion, and culture. His approach combines legal analysis of case law with tools drawn from the anthropology and sociology of religion, all within a comparative framework that centres on the Israeli context but also engages with other legal and cultural settings. More specifically, his research explores the discourse of religious sincerity and the institutional assessment of belief, focusing particularly on how legal systems engage with questions of authenticity, conviction, and religious experience within legal proceedings. His work also examines the differences between religious claims raised in private law (such as contract and tort law) and those appearing in public law (such as administrative and constitutional law), and discusses the possible justifications, if any, for these distinctions.
Lavi holds an LL.B. from Bar-Ilan University and an LL.M. from the joint programme of the Emil Zola Chair for Human Rights and the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. He also holds a BA in Education and previously worked as a teacher. Since his admission to the Israeli Bar in 2019, he has worked as a commercial litigator, a parliamentary advisor on legislative matters to the chair of the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee, and a law clerk at the Tel Aviv District Court.
Why Law and Anthropology?
Combining law and anthropology makes it possible to examine how legal institutions engage with the real, lived complexities of identity, ritual, and belief – dimensions that often elude formal legal categories. Juxtaposing legal analysis with ethnographic insights offers a broader set of tools for understanding how religious experience is presented, interpreted, and evaluated within legal arenas.
This interdisciplinary perspective reveals both the capacity and the limitations of law in addressing diverse ways of living in plural societies. It brings into dialogue legal reasoning and anthropological observation, offering two complementary lenses through which to understand the encounter between normative frameworks and the personal and communal worlds of meaning they seek to regulate.