This is a higher education student and staff mobility project, please consult the website of the organisation to obtain additional details.

Despite the Israeli law proclaiming Jerusalem to be the sole and eternal capital of Israel, the city is, in terms of the laws in force and the courts in operation, a mosaic of texts, institutions, jurisdictions and statutes that are at once complementary, superimposed and contradictory., mirror of the current conflict and bearer of new disputes. Thinking about the place Jerusalem will occupy in future negotiations (inevitable but unforeseeable) requires mapping, on the smallest possible scale, the laws in force and the jurisdictions in place, as well as carrying out a close-up, detailed ethnography of how they work. The ambition of JORDIN is to map, document and ethnographically describe, in the fields of family and land tenure, the different laws and legal practices coexisting in Jerusalem, in order to describe both their ordinary modes of operation and the inscription of this ordinary in a regime of exception. To carry out its descriptive and analytical work, JORDIN will conduct, first, the historical and spatial mapping of Jerusalemite inter-legality. Second, it will explore the diachronic process through which religious laws and land law transformed into state-backed positive law. Third, combining pragmatic history and legal ethnography, it will observe legal practices in both religious courts and land-tenure transactions. Two additional questions will be raised in a transversal way. There is, on the one hand, the question as to whether the diversity and fragmentation of the Jerusalemite legal and judicial landscape, which generates a discourse about “multiculturalism,” does not as a cover for discrimination, neglect, and the formation of Jewish hegemony. On the other, there is the question to know whether the strongly gendered nature of these orders is not exacerbated by the asymmetries generated by territorial and institutional fragmentation. The project, based at the French Center in Jerusalem and bringing together an articulated team of jurists, anthropologists, political scientists and historians, offers a combination of jurisprudence, pragmatic legal history and legal ethnography, three perspectives which converge in an approach centered on legal practices and their processual transformation.