Yehuda Blum's article, ostensibly devoted to an examination of the lawfulness of a military order under the law of occupation, actually explored a preliminary question – whether Jordan had valid title to the West Bank (referred to as ‘Judea and Samaria’). Concluding that Jordan had no title, Blum concluded that the law of occupation did not apply. This reflection revisits Blum's thesis. It suggests that Blum's argument failed to elucidate the relevant legal questions and therefore his conclusion was hasty. It would be distressing to think that it was Blum's article that convinced Israeli decision-makers to deny the formal applicability of the law of occupation to the West Bank and Gaza.

Offering a current reflection on Raphael Walden's 1977 article, ‘The Subjective Element in the Formation of Customary International Law’, this contribution seeks to illustrate that considerable clarity has been achieved over the decades with regard to several long-standing questions associated with customary international law, not least those surrounding opinio juris. Accumulated practice and constructive scholarship have supplied insights into, and indeed answers to several of the controversies that have bedevilled the theory of this central source of international law. While it may inherently defy exact formulations, and some theoretical questions remain, customary international law is thus today not only as present in the international legal system as it has always been but is also better understood.

The quarter-century anniversary of Israel's ratification of the major United Nations (UN) human rights treaties is an opportunity to revisit the formal and informal interaction between domestic and international Bills of Rights in Israel. This study reveals that the human rights conventions lack almost entirely a formal domestic legal status. The study identifies a minor shift in the scope of the Israeli Supreme Court's reference to international law, as the Court now cites international human rights law to justify decisions that a state action is unlawful, and not only to support findings that an action is valid. This shift may be the result of other reasons, for instance, a ‘radiation’ of the Court's relatively extensive use of international humanitarian law in reviewing state actions taken in the Occupied Territories. However, it may also reflect a perception of enhanced legitimacy of referring to international human rights law as a point of reference in human rights adjudication following ratification of the treaties.

At the same time, the Court continues to avoid acknowledging incompatibility between domestic law and international law. It refers to the latter only to support its interpretation of Israeli constitutional law, as it did before the ratification. This article critically evaluates this practice. While international human rights law should not be binding at the domestic level, because of its lack of sufficient democratic legitimacy in Israel, it should serve as an essential benchmark. The Court may legitimise a human rights infringement that is unjustified according to international law, but such incompatibility requires an explicit justification. The Court, together with the legislature and the government, are required to engage critically with the non-binding norms set by the ratified UN human rights treaties.

The role of courts as lawmakers has been scrutinised, partly because of the questions it raises regarding legitimacy. This scrutiny has sometimes assumed that courts are safe from legitimacy-based criticism in their role as appliers of law. However, recent events in the United Kingdom show that, regrettably, this is not so: the media reaction to the judgments in the Brexit case of Miller went far beyond criticism of the courts’ reasoning or conclusions. It was an attack on legitimacy. Insofar as such attacks arise out of misunderstandings about the nature of adjudication (including, for example, the existence and scope of judicial discretion), one way of countering them is for the legal community (scholars, judges, practitioners) to continue to increase public awareness about these issues. However, it is incumbent upon other parts of the state – the executive and the legislature – to respond promptly to such attacks in order to uphold the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law.

This article, departing from Gila Stopler's ‘Rights in Immigration: The Veil as a Test Case’, published in the Israeli Law Review in 2010, reviews how the time spent by a long-term migrant, irrespective of legal status, normatively figures in liberal theories of migration and in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The article detects that in contemporary liberal theories, assigning an independent normative value to time spent by the migrant in the receiving country is a key move in balancing the competing interests of migrants and of the migrant-receiving country, where the right of the country to regulate migration is taken as given: the longer a migrant is present in a country, the stronger her interests become in receiving citizenship status or treatment akin to citizens. The article then surveys the case law of the ECtHR relating to long-term migrants. It finds that time is often one of multiple normative considerations in the balancing exercise, in conjunction with whether a migrant has achieved social integration in the migrant-receiving country and whether the right of the receiving community to regulate migration for reasons of affording citizenship, national security or distributive justice is paramount. The article argues that the lack of an independent normative weight afforded to time in the case law of the ECtHR is not merely a tension between the translation of liberal normative theory to legal policy. It also shows a deeper tension in liberal theories of migration between national liberalism and cosmopolitan liberalism.