Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine is both a book about Palestine and a meditation on the risks and benefits of international law for national liberation movements in pursuit of decolonization and emancipation. The book briskly covers an enormous expanse of Palestinian history, as refracted through the international law framings that have facilitated Palestinian dispossession. Much recent scholarship on legal aspects of the Palestinian case has focused on the rise and demise of the Oslo peace process. In contrast, Noura Erakat provides a comprehensive history of the conflict centered on the international law dimensions of the Palestinian struggle. She does this in fluid, accessible prose, setting forth arguments of equal interest to scholars of international law and of Middle East studies, as well as broader audiences.
There are two important concepts that recur throughout. The first is “legal work,” a term Erakat borrows from Duncan Kennedy to...
University of California Press