ARTS&LIFE BOOK REVIEW
Talmudic Legal Thinking Author brings humor, sports and celebrities to this serious topic. LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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udi Levine, a native Detroiter who now lives in Texas, has written a lively, funny, readable, informative book about what could be a forbidding topic — legal thinking in the Talmud. This book is not for everyone, though. However, if you fit into the target audience, you will certainly want to read his book, Are You Sure? (Volume 1) How Chazakahs Guide Us Through the Unknown (Shikey Yudi Levine Press). The book focuses on a difficult problem in comparative law: What should courts do when we do not have clear evidence? What should we do when we do not have enough evidence, or when the evidence is unclear or contradictory? Most of our lives, we do not have enough evidence to reach certainty, and yet we still have to decide. Law courts certainly have to reach decisions. In law, some official has to have the power to decide. The legal system can emphasize rules
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for the official to follow “if the ball crosses the plate above the batter’s knees” or it can emphasize empowering the official “if, in the opinion of the umpire, the ball crossed the plate.” The Talmud devotes much thought to the nature of the rules. In the Talmud, a rule to use in cases of doubt is called a chazakah, a legal presumption establishing burden of proof. A chazakah, in Levine’s definition, “guides us through the unknown.” Levine provides us with a systematic classification of the different varieties of these rules. For each rule, he describes its function as it appears in the Talmud. Invariably, the Talmudic rabbis disagree about the scope and meaning of the rules, and later rabbis disagree about what the early rabbis meant. Levine guides us through the disputes with clear conceptual analyses. This is real scholarship. The enthusiastic forward for this book was written by Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University and director of its
Program of Jewish and Israeli Law. So, the book provides significant material for serious study. But I described the book as funny, not a typical description of books of Talmudic analysis. Part of the humor comes from this: Levine illustrates each doubt with examples from the world of sports or of popular entertainment. His examples typically convince the reader of the continuing need for systematic thinking about conflicts, and often show the current value of the resolutions suggested by Talmudic rabbis. These discussions startle by rubbing together material from different cultures. Discussions of Talmudic thinking do not often consid-
er the wisdom of the National Basketball Association when it decided to recognize Grant Hill and Jason Kidd as co-winners of the Rookie of the Year award. Would it have been a greater honor to recognize one as Rookie of the Year of the Eastern Conference and the other of the Western Conference? Or does the shared honor as co-holder of the Rookie of the Year of the whole NBA seem greater? Somehow, in Levine’s analysis, this question illuminates a dispute between Rambam and Tosfos about how to analyze the first Mishnah in Bava Metsiah, in which two disputants come to court, each holding the same garment and claiming the whole thing. Discussions of Talmudic