Ruth Gavison

Ruth Gavison was born in 1945 in Jerusalem

Ruth Gavison was born in Jerusalem on March 28, 1945, to a Sephardic Jewish family. Her father's family came to Jerusalem from Tetouan in Morocco in the 19th century. She grew up in Haifa, studied at the Reali School and was a member of the Scouts.

After her army service she studied law, economics and philosophy at the Hebrew University. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Halevi and earned a master's degree in law in 1971. In 1975 she received a doctorate in legal philosophy from the University of Oxford, with a thesis on the right to privacy.

She taught at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law until she retired in 2010 and held the Haim H. Cohn Chair for Human Rights. She was a visiting professor at Yale and at the University of Southern California. She was a founding member of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and its president from 1996 to 1999.

She sat on several public committees, including the Winograd Commission on the 2006 Lebanon War. In 2003 she published the Gavison-Medan Covenant with Rabbi Yaakov Medan, a proposal on religion and state. In 2005 she founded the Metzilah center and led it until her death.

She was nominated for the Supreme Court, but she was not appointed after Court President Aharon Barak opposed her. In 2014 she advised against passing a nation-state law. She lived in Jerusalem and died on August 15, 2020.