Dishing Up Israel: Rethinking the Potential of Legal Mixité

The field of mixed legal studies has recently been engaged in discussions about the virtues of merit-driven versus integrity-driven judgments in law making. Integrity-driven judgements aspire to locate solutions in a way that will generate greater coincidence with one overall legal tradition in settings where two or more are mixed. The latter style of judgement has historically preoccupied mixed jurisdictions where the Civil law has felt the need to struggle for its place when paired with a dominating Common law alter. A more pragmatic merit-driven approach has been advocated for by some mixed jurisdiction scholars as a means of allowing the mixité to flourish according to its contemporary context and bundle of sociological needs. This paper reexamines the tension between these two approaches to judgement. It does so by taking a slightly off-kilter look at mixité in one of the more vexed and volatile mixed jurisdictions in the world: Israel/Palestine. The paper does not take as a point of inquiry either the classic Civil law/Common law mix of the jurisdiction, nor its increasingly more strident religious law/secular law tension. The paper, rather, focuses and elaborates upon one of the reigning metaphors of mixed legal studies – food – through the most prominent tension of the jurisdiction – Israeli/Palestinian – and pushes that metaphor in ways that might better reflect the dialogic and contested nature of all mixités