Alon Harel

Alon Harel was born in 1957

Alon Harel was born on December 7, 1957, and grew up in Tel Aviv. His father came from Poland and his mother from Germany, and both died when he was a teenager. His father, Yeshayahu Harel, was a magistrate judge and later a lawyer who wrote several books.

He attended the Herzliya Gymnasium and served in the IDF as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps. He earned law degrees from the Hebrew University in 1983 and 1985, and a doctorate in legal philosophy from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1988, supervised by Joseph Raz. He then completed another master's degree in law at Yale University.

He joined the Hebrew University faculty in 1990 and became a full professor in 2003. Since 2006 he has held the Mizock Chair in Administrative and Criminal Law. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Toronto, Chicago and Texas, and he founded and edits the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies with David Enoch.

His research covers legal theory, political philosophy and the economic analysis of criminal law, including a defense of judicial review. He served on the board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and writes opinion pieces in Haaretz. In 2026, a Jerusalem small claims court ordered him to pay 20,000 shekels for libel over a 2024 Facebook post about Uri Kirshenbaum.