116 Mark Washofsky
camp, to the importance of maintaining a strict-construction approach to the law’s interpretation. The authors are not shy about stating that normative commitment, even as they present their findings as the product of objective scholarly investigation. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the religious and ideological commitments of Nahum Rakover and his mishpat ivri colleagues shine through their doctrinal legal writing. For that matter, the work we undertake in the name of“progressive halakhah™ owes its impetus and direction to our value perspective that the Jewish legal tradition can and ought to be interpreted and applied toward the attainment of liberal ends and purposes.'*” None of this, I hasten to add, means that objectivity is an empty or worthless concept. We can acknowledge the inevitable influence of perspective and value commitments upon a scholar’s work and yet continue to insist that there is a difference“between scientific research and apologetics, between research based on facts and data and expressions of mere wishful thinking.”'* Clearly, a bit of pragmatic realism is called for here. While the ideal of scientific(wertfrei or“mathematical”
might be better terms) objectivity is presumably beyond the reach of the flesh-and-blood human researcher, she is nonetheless capable of examining the data critically and of interpreting them in accordance with the“agreed-upon, if tentative, conventions™'** that comprise the methodological canons of her discipline. We are certainly entitled to demand that legal scholarship adhere to such a standard. What more, indeed, can we ask of it?
3. The Halakhah of Privacy in the Age of the Internet. My effort in the first section of this article was primarily descriptive. I surveyed the efforts of scholars working in both the AngloAmerican and the Jewish legal traditions to construct a“right” or 2 “value” of personal privacy out of a welter of existing provisions of the law. In part 2, I took on an evaluative function, arguing that this sort of constructive interpretation is a legitimate move in both traditions. Jurists and halakhists are entitled to derive new legal substance on the basis of recognized fundamental principles of law, using those principles to bring coherence and purpose to the “data,” the mass of rules, precedents, and facts contained in the