42 Mark Washofsky

that is not subject to its own laws does not act as a government in any meaningful sense of that term. He suggests that the“rule of law” must include the observance of a number of specific principles that guarantee the openness of the law, the independence and supervisory role of the judiciary, and the placing of real limitations upon the police powers of the regime.

4. Ronald Dworkin , Law's Empire(Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press, 1986), 93. The late Israeli Supreme Court justice Haim Cohn argued that“the rule of law” rests upon three foundations: the subjugation of the political institutions of the state to the supervision of the law; the independence of the judges who interpret and apply the law; and the great deference paid to the life and the freedom of the individual citizen. See Cohn’s Hamishpat(Jerusalem : Mosad Bialik, 1991), 143.

5. See Haim Cohn , Human Rights in Jewish Law(New York : Ktav, 1984), 17-18, as well as Hamishpat, 513. Still, as Cohn notes, the existence of a“right” can be inferred from a corresponding duty: the prohibition of homicide, for example, implies a right to life. See below in the text at notes 8 and 9.

6. See Tur and Shulchan Arukh Choshen Mishpat 2.

7. This is not to say that one cannot pursue an inquiry into Jewish political theory by means of other genres of thought and expression. Philosophers and social scientists, after all, study the history and development of political ideas from the vantage point of their own disciplines. My claim, rather, is that regardless of the discipline, a Jewish political theory must be derived from source materials that the Jews have historically regarded as authoritative on matters of practice and that these source materials are primarily halakhic ones. See, for example, Menachem Lorberbaum , Politics and the Limits of Law(Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2001) and Gerald Blidstein , Ekronot medini’im bemishnat harambam(Ramat Gan : Bar Ilan University , 2001).

8. Yad, De’ot 7:1-4. Note that“gossip” includes speaking about another person even if one’s words happen to be true. Lying about another to his detriment is defined as hotza’at shem ra. The roots of this particular transgression stretch back to Deuteronomy 22:18-19, which prescribes corporal punishment and a monetary fine for one who files a false claim concerning his wife’s lack of virginity upon marriage(hotzi shem ra). The Rabbis expanded the scope of this offense to include lying about any other person; see B. Arakhin 15a. This usage, it should be noted, is a colloquial one, a synonym for“negative gossip”; it is not strictly speaking a crime or a tort, and it carries no legal penalty. One wonders whether Jewish law, had it adjudicated such matters, would have developed a conception of slander or libel as an actionable offense in the same way that it developed a conception of copyright following the invention of printing. On that subject, see R. Solomon B. Freehof, Contemporary Reform Responsa(Cincinnati : Hebrew Union College Press , 1974), no. 55, and CCAR Responsa Committee, no. 5761.1,“Copyright and the Internet”(http://data.ccarnet.org/cgi-bin/respdisp.pl?file=1&year=5761). The point here, at any rate, is that all sorts of gossip, whether the information conveyed is true or false, is prohibited by Jewish law.