The Many Exiles of Max Laserson

Clio@Themis Revue électronique d'histoire du droit 22 | 2022 Les juristes en voyageurs. Ce que les circulations humaines font aux savoirs juridiques (XVIe-XXe siècle) The Many Exiles of Max Laserson Assaf Likhovski Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/cliothemis/2087 ISSN: 2105-0929 Publisher Association Clio et Themis Electronic reference Assaf Likhovski, “The Many Exiles of Max Laserson”, Clio@Themis [Online], 22 | 2022, Online since 30 May 2022, connection on 30 May 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cliothemis/2087 This text was automatically generated on 30 May 2022. Clio@Themis Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International The Many Exiles of Max Laserson The Many Exiles of Max Laserson Assaf Likhovski For comments and suggestions on earlier drafts I thank Tatiana Borisova, William E. Butler, Orly Erez-Likhovski, James Loeffler, Dina Moyal, Anat Rosenberg, David Schorr, the participants of the colloquium held in October 2021 in Bordeaux, and the editors of the Clio@Themis issue on jurists as travelers, Laetitia Guerlain and Luisa Brunori, as well as the editor in chief of the journal, Xavier Prévost. I also thank my research assistants Tamar Ben-Ozer, Ella Itkin, Julija Levin, and Anna Lotan for their assistance with the collection and translation of the sources used in this article, as well as Hana Liashkevich, Lev Beingoltz, and Philippa Shimrat. Research for this article was supported by an Israel Science Foundation (ISF) research grant number no. 1377/21. I. Introduction 1 In the summer of 1936 Max Laserson, a Jewish-Russian-Latvian legal scholar who was living at the time in Tel Aviv, sought to renew his contact with an old Russian acquaintance of his, Pitirim Sorokin, now the chairperson of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Laserson and Sorokin had both been students in St. Petersburg of a leading late-imperial Russian legal philosopher, Leon Petrażycki, and both had briefly served in relatively high-ranking government posts during the February 1917 revolution1. 2 The last contact between Laserson and Sorokin had been in 1930, when Laserson was still living in Riga, the capital of the newly established state of Latvia. In Riga, Laserson served as a member of the Latvian Parliament between 1922 and 1931, representing a small social-democratic Zionist party. He taught at a Jewish high school and at a private institution of higher education – the Riga Commercial College. He also briefly attempted to earn a living as a lawyer. The six years that had elapsed since the last letter exchanged between Laserson and Sorokin had been turbulent and tragic for Laserson. His first wife died of cancer in 1932, and in 1934, following an authoritarian coup d’état in Latvia, Laserson was imprisoned for half a year in a concentration camp and was then forced to leave Latvia for British-ruled Palestine 2. Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 1 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson 3 Born in 1887 in the town of Jelgava (Mitau in German, Mitava in Russian), in the Russian province of Courland, 40 kilometers south of Riga, Laserson was a polyglot whose works were written in Russian, Yiddish, Latvian, German, Hebrew, French and English. He was therefore able to continue his teaching career in Palestine, helping to establish another private institution of higher education, the Tel Aviv School for Law and Economics, where he lectured in Hebrew. However, he told Sorokin, he was feeling tired and exhausted. His move to Palestine was his second forced emigration, and he had already had to reinvent himself as a legal scholar several times. He began his career writing about the law of late-imperial Russia, but this legal system disappeared following the revolutions of February and October 1917. He then remade himself into an expert on interwar democratic Latvian law, and also interwar international law, writing on the minorities regime supervised by the League of Nations. Latvia, however, was now an authoritarian country, and its democratic institutions were no longer relevant. Similarly, the minorities regime was disintegrating due to the decline of the League of Nations. Another scholarly arena in which Laserson attempted to make a name for himself was Weimar Germany. In the 1920s and 1930s Laserson published several works in German, and he also served as a guest professor in Berlin and Heidelberg, but his prospects as a German-speaking legal scholar disappeared with the rise of Hitler to power in 1933. Now he was hoping that Sorokin would assist him in finding an academic position in the United States. At the beginning of his letter Laserson stated that he was not writing the letter because of material problems. However, as the letter progressed, these loomed larger. His salary as a professor at Tel Aviv, Laserson wrote, was inadequate. Palestine itself was “small, poor and under construction” and had no use for scholars dealing with abstract legal topics. Instead, it needed good carpenters. If Laserson was to continue his academic career, he had to move again. An invitation to an American lecture tour could boost his chances of finding a position in the United States, and Laserson therefore beseeched Sorokin to arrange such a tour. “Pitirim Alexandrovich”, he implored in his letter, “give me a chance, help me!”3. 4 The late 1930s, however, were not a good time to be a European émigré scholar. Nothing came out of the initial letter. In subsequent years, Laserson sent several other letters to Sorokin, but no position materialized in the United States or elsewhere 4. As Sorokin explained in a February 1939 letter to Laserson there were “twelve to eighteen thousand” European scholars now besieging American universities, and only “several hundred of them” could be absorbed5. Nonetheless, in July 1939 Laserson finally managed to obtain an American visa issued for research proposes. The war caught him in Paris, and from there he traveled to London and New York. In New York he found work as a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Institute of Jewish Affairs (the research institute of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress), and he also lectured at Columbia University. Laserson died in New York in November 19516. 5 In hindsight, it could be said that Laserson was extremely lucky. In the summer of 1941, when Laserson was in New York, the entire Jewish population of his home town of Jelgava, numbering more than 1,500 men women and children, were murdered by Latvian and German policemen7. Laserson’s forced move from Latvia to Palestine in the mid-1930s thus saved his life. Nevertheless, compared with legal scholars in the West, Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 2 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson Laserson’s life was plagued by recurrent geographical and intellectual dislocation between countries, languages and legal systems. 6 There has been some scholarly interest in the way exile reshaped the ideas of interwar Jewish legal scholars8. This article seeks to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion by considering Laserson’s life9. My approach is neither strictly biographical nor is it an ahistorical exploration of Laserson’s ideas from the perspective of legal philosophy10. Instead, my goal is to assess the impact of forced travel – emigration and exile – on Laserson’s works11. 7 An analysis of Laserson’s writing provides contradictory answers to the question of the impact of exile on legal ideas. On the one hand, the focal point of Laserson’s scholarship changed as a result of the many dislocations of his life. He began his career in Russia of the 1910s mainly as a legal philosopher. As a Latvian and Jewish scholar-politician in the 1920s and 1930s much of Laserson’s work focused on constitutional and international law, with a specific emphasis on the interwar League of Nations’ minorities treaties system, although he continued to publish works on legal philosophy, becoming a leading expounder of Russian legal philosophy in the German-speaking legal world. In Palestine, he wrote works in Hebrew and English on the League of Nations mandates system, and in the United States the main focus of his research shifted from law to history, international relations, and contemporary affairs, and he became an authority on the recent history of Russia and the Soviet Union. 8 Nevertheless, there were some topics that he was interested in in all stages of his life. For example, as a young scholar in Russia, a middle-aged scholar in Palestine, and an elderly scholar in the United States, Laserson manifested a continued interest in Jewish law. Laserson’s movements in space thus only partly changed the focus of his scholarship. Another element of continuity can also be discerned in his scholarship. Throughout his life, Laserson served as a “borderland jurist”, an intermediary who transplanted foreign ideas to a local audience 12. Thus, he transplanted German legal ideas to Russia in the second decade of the 20 th century; Russian ideas to Latvia and Germany between 1920 and 1935; Western ideas to Palestine, and finally Russian and Soviet ideas to the United States. In this sense, despite his many exiles, Laserson never left the Baltic borderlands where he was born. 9 In the first part of this article, I will analyze the way in which Laserson’s exiles changed his scholarship, consider the topics he wrote on in each period of his life and then focus on his continuing interest in the history of Jewish legal philosophy, showing shifts in the way he discussed this topic during his Russian and Palestinian periods. In the second part, I will discuss continuity in his scholarship by analyzing some of his works that transplanted foreign ideas (legal and otherwise) to a local audience. In the conclusion, I reflect on the lessons that can be learnt from Laserson’s life, and also note some similarities between his life and the life of other interwar legal scholars. II. Plus ça change A. Topics 10 Laserson graduated from the law faculty of Saint Petersburg Imperial University in 1910. He worked for a period in Kharkov, studied law in Berlin, Heidelberg and Tartu, and then returned to what was now Petrograd and taught there at the Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 3 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson Psychoneurological Institute, and also as a privatdozent (a certified but unpaid lecturer) at the Imperial University. Following the February 1917 revolution, which led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of a Provisional Government in Russia, he became the deputy director of national minorities in the Interior Ministry13. Between 1909, when he published his first article, and 1920, when he left Russia, he published approximately twenty works: articles, book reviews, pamphlets and reports, in Russian and German, dealing with the philosophy of law, constitutional law, and international law14. 11 Laserson’s works on the philosophy of law included, for example, an article on natural law in ancient Jewish texts, and another article outlining the approach of the new German Free Law School15. His constitutional law works included a short book on the Russian court system, but also articles on comparative constitutional law, for example on the proportional election system of Belgium16. Works on international law dealt with issues such as minority rights in international law17. 12 After he moved to the newly independent Latvia, the legal systems Laserson wrote on, as well as his audience, changed. In his July 1936 letter to Sorokin he said that during his Russian period he had written articles “on contemporary Russian constitutional law of the last imperial period (1906-1917)”, but as a result of the February 1917 revolution, “all the old constitutional structures had disappeared”, and his works had become “wastepaper”. Following the February 1917 revolution, Laserson continued, he had written “a thick book and several brochures about democratic Russian state law, [but] with the arrival of the Bolsheviks, 7-8 months later”, these works too became “counterrevolutionary wastepaper”18. 13 In Latvia, Laserson therefore had to reinvent himself. His main audience were no longer Russian lawyers. He remade himself into a Latvian-Zionist politician and a Latvian legal scholar. However, interwar Latvia was small and provincial. It was a country of approximately two million people, and although it was more developed than some other east European countries, its economy was backward in comparison with west European countries, partly due to the economic devastation and depopulation caused by World War I19. Laserson therefore also turned his attention to a larger country with a broader audience for his scholarship – Germany (and also Austria). He published many of his works from this period in German, in central European scholarly venues. 14 As a Zionist politician he published a pamphlet in Yiddish on the Palestine Mandate, a book in Russian on Jewish history and Zionism, and also wrote on the interwar minorities regime, a topic that occupied him not just as a scholar but also as a politician both on the Latvian and on the international level20. As a Latvian statesman and legal scholar he published works in Latvian on Latvian constitutional law and on legal philosophy21. Laserson still published some works in Russian, including a textbook on legal philosophy22. However, a major part of his scholarship now targeted a Germanspeaking audience. He published articles in legal journals such as the Jahrbuch des öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart, and the Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht. Some of these works dealt with Latvian law and the interwar minorities regime, but he also published more theoretical works, such as one devoted to legal philology or another summarizing the history and ideas of 19 th – and early 20th – century Russian legal philosophy, which was also translated in 1936 into Japanese 23. Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 4 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson 15 Again, however, his academic efforts were scuttled by political events. The rise of German Nazism and Latvian authoritarianism in the 1930 made much of his scholarship obsolete. As he told Sorokin in 1936, since Hitler’s rise to power, I have lost the most important reservoir of my scientific inspiration and work […] as Secretary of the Public Law Commission of the [Latvian] Parliament, I worked on the creation of Latvian state law in a democratic style, and outside of Latvia I worked on an equally solid German Republican Democratic state law. And this work too turned out to be a source of vexation, distraction, and wastepaper24. 16 Exiled by the new authoritarian Latvian regime, Laserson moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1935 and began teaching in the Tel Aviv School for Law and Economics, a new, private institution of higher education of which he was one of the four founders and which was, in some ways, similar to the Riga Commercial College, where he had taught during his Latvian period25. One of the other founders was also a recent immigrant from Latvia, the economist Benjamin Siew, who had also taught at the Riga Commercial College. The other two were more veteran local legal scholars: Paltiel Dikshtein and Shmuel Eisenstadt, who had arrived in Palestine from Russia in the 1920s and were involved with the movement for the revival of Jewish law. This movement, inspired by German Romantic conceptions of cultural nationalism, called for the creation of a national legal system for the Jews in Palestine, a system that would be based on the norms and procedures found in Jewish law 26. 17 The legal system of Mandatory Palestine comprised a mixture of norms taken from Islamic, French, and English law. Since Mandatory Palestine was a creation of the League of Nations, interwar international law also played a role. At the Tel Aviv School Laserson taught constitutional law, public international law and jurisprudence and turned his scholarly attention to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the international treaty that served as the basis of British rule in Palestine 27. Already in 1922, when he was still in Latvia, Laserson had published a pamphlet on the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which was promulgated that year 28. However, in Latvia his constitutional scholarship had focused mostly on Latvian constitutional law, and his works on international law had dealt with the minorities regime. Now the focus of his constitutional and international law scholarship shifted to the League of Nations mandates system. Laserson published an article and a short book on the topic in Hebrew and also compiled a large collection of documents in English on the Mandate for Palestine which included both diplomatic and international law documents as well as relevant decisions of the courts of Palestine29. 18 The focus of Laserson’s jurisprudential scholarship also shifted. In 1937 he published an article in French on the legal philosophy of the preeminent medieval Jewish scholar, Maimonides, and in 1939 he published an extended Hebrew version of this piece 30. His audience in this realm were no longer German legal scholars, but scholars from the remaining democratic countries of the West, such as members of the Institut International de Philosophie du Droit et de Sociologie Juridique, based in Paris, to which he belonged, as well as scholars of Jewish law in Mandatory Palestine and beyond 31. 19 Laserson moved to the United States during the last months of 1939. He lectured at Columbia University and worked at the Institute for Jewish Affairs (the research institute of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The American period, which ended with his death in 1951, seems to have been the most productive of his life. His extensive Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 5 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson publications during this period included many works on topics that he had already written on in the past, including non-academic pamphlets in English and Yiddish on Jewish affairs and academic articles on Jewish topics such as the ideas of the medieval scholar Saadia Gaon, the Jewish contribution to international law, or works on recent Israeli constitutional law32. He also wrote, for an English-speaking audience, about other topics that he was an expert on before his move to the United States such as the status of Latvia in international law, creating a world federation, the minorities problem, the sociology of ethics, natural law (from a Petrażyckian perspective), Petrażycki’s legal thought, and Russian sociology33. 20 Much of his work, however, now revolved around a new topic: the history, politics and diplomatic relations of east European countries in general and Russia and the Soviet Union in particular. The rise of the Soviet Union during World War II, and the Cold War, to the rank of a leading world power meant that Laserson finally found a broad audience for his scholarship. He wrote books on the history of the Curzon line dividing Poland and the Soviet Union during the interwar period, on the recent history of Poland and the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1945, and on the relationship between Russia and the West, in addition to several articles on related topics 34. An interesting subtopic in this body of work was Russian views of the United States from the 18 th century to the present35. 21 Having pointed to some shifts in Laserson’s research focus as he moved from place to place, I should now like to discuss in more detail how his movement in space (and time) reshaped his scholarship on Jewish law, a topic that seemed to have engaged his interest throughout his life. B. Jewish Law 22 Laserson, who grew up in a traditional Jewish home, published articles dealing with Jewish law, and specifically with natural law notions in Jewish law, when he was in Russia, Palestine and the United States36. For example, the Jewish notion of the seven Noahide laws – which included the prohibition of idol worship, murder, theft and incest, and also the duty to establish courts of law – was a topic that he returned to many times.37 The Noahide laws were, according to Jewish texts, applicable to all of humanity, gentiles and Jews alike. In Russia of the 1910s, Laseron wrote about the appearance of this notion in Judea during the post-Babylonian Exile period. 38 In 1930s Palestine he analyzed discussions of the Noahide laws in the Talmud, and also by Maimonides39. In the United States in the 1940s, he claimed that the Noahide laws had influenced early modern Christian pioneers of international law such as Grotius and Selden40. There were, however, certain changes in the Laserson’s arguments and depictions of Jewish law, and the motivations that prompted his interest, in different periods of his life. I will illustrate these changes by comparing two of Laserson’s articles, one written in Russia in the 1910s, and another written in Palestine in the 1930s. 23 One of Laserson’s first articles, published in 1912 in the Moscow periodical Voprosy Prava, was devoted to natural law in ancient Jewish texts. This article manifested the influence of Marx’s and Petrażycki’s theories. The Marxist influence is evident, for example, in the emphasis that Laserson placed on the role of economic conditions in shaping law and in a class-based interpretation of biblical legal history, inspired by the Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 6 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson work of the Marxist theoretician, Karl Kautsky. Thus, Laserson argued that the fact that the Israelites were mainly nomadic herders and farmers, and not merchants and craftsmen, influenced their law, which was focused on land law rather that civil or commercial law. He called the prophets advocates of the people’s rights, who stood by the “oppressed masses” and opposed the disparity between rich and poor that existed in ancient Israel. He argued that biblical positive law served the interests of the powerful, while natural law reflected the interest of the lower classes, and depicted the Second Temple Jewish sect, the Essenes, as “the first practical communists”, and Jesus and his followers as “a movement of the Jewish proletariat” 41. 24 The Petrażyckian influence on Laserson’s article is evident in his discussion of the relationship between psychology and law, his interest in the development of intuitive legal consciousness, and his discussion of natural law, all topics that can be traced to Petrażycki’s works42. Seeking to establish how the notion of natural law developed among the Israelites Laserson pointed to factors such as the role of the prophets and the interaction between Jews and Gentiles during and after the Babylonian exile 43. Unlike other Russian-Jewish scholars at the time, in this article Laserson did not call in any way for a revival of Jewish law. The article, written for a Russian audience, saw Jewish legal history as a case study that could be used to illustrate wider theoretical concerns, whether Marxist or Petrażyckian. It did not view Jewish law as a repository of norms and institutions that could be revived and used in the present. 25 In the second half of the 1930s, after Laserson moved to Palestine and started teaching at the Tel Aviv School, a bastion of the Jewish legal revival movement, his writings became enmeshed in the scholarship produced by that movement. His analysis of Jewish law was thus no longer designed to interpret Jewish legal history within a global framework but to show non-Jewish audiences the importance of the history of Jewish law to the comparative history of global legal thought, and also to convince Jewish readers that Jewish law was not archaic, but based on modern values and therefore still relevant for the present44 . 26 These changes were evident in an article that Laserson published in 1937 in French on Maimonides’ legal philosophy, and also in an expanded version of this article that was later published in Hebrew as a short book. The French article began with the statement that its purpose was to “fill a lacuna”. The literature on the philosophy of law had ignored legal thinkers from the “non-Christian world”, and Laserson sought to correct this omission by showing the influence of Maimonides on modern legal thinkers. Laserson then argued that Maimonides’ thought had influenced Baruch Spinoza and via Spinoza had had an impact on the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and therefore also on modern doctrines of international and constitutional law45. In the Hebrew version of the article, however, Laserson also sought to further a Jewish legal-nationalist agenda by arguing that Jewish scholars should devote more attention to the study of Jewish legal thought, and seek to prove that Jewish law was not an obsolete legal system, but one that resonated with modern democratic values. 27 Like the article in French, the Hebrew version began with a note on the importance of Jewish legal philosophers to the global history of law. After lamenting the fact that Jews had contributed to the development of Western legal philosophy but had neglected to tend “[their] own vineyard”, Laserson argued that “we will mostly be able to permanently contribute to the global literature on law by analyzing Jewish legal philosophy and theory, because our interpretative and dogmatic analysis is bound to Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 7 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson remain, as any legal dogmatics, only on the national level [...] the development of Jewish legal science demands that we discover the unique [contribution] of Jewish thought to the general treasure of human civilization”46. In particular, he argued, the subject of his book, Maimonides, should be considered as one of the classic thinkers of the global science of law. Studying Jewish legal thought, Laserson continued, would also prove that commendable and modern notions such as natural rights, freedom, tolerance, and opposition to despotism were not modern western inventions but had already appeared in ancient Jewish texts.47 28 Western jurisprudential literature claimed that the distinction between positive and natural law appeared only in the West and was related to the individualist nature of ancient Greek and ancient Roman societies, but this was wrong, said Laserson. The critique of existing laws, leading to the appearance of the idea of natural law, was not a uniquely Western phenomenon since such a critique appeared in every society, including in ancient Judaism48. Moreover, during the Middle Ages, Judaism, or more specifically, Maimonides in his treatise, The Guide for the Perplexed, developed the idea of natural law in a way that influenced early modern Western theorists. One major innovation that Laserson attributed to Maimonides was the notion of religion civile, civil religion, a short list of moral dogmas essential for the peace and stability of any state, such as the belief in God, in the afterlife, in punishment for the wicked and reward for the good. The notion of civil religion, buttressing the state and guaranteeing its stability, can be found in the works of Hobbes, Spinoza and Rousseau, but Laserson argued that it could be traced back to Maimonides, and specifically to chapter 28 of part III of The Guide for the Perplexed49. 29 In arguing for the importance of Maimonides’ thought Laserson was not only motivated by cultural nationalism, that is, by a desire to show that Jewish legal thought was an important chapter in the history of global legal thought. He was also reacting to the events of the 1930s in an attempt to use Maimonides’ ideas to create a basis for a critique of both Communism and Nazism. Natural law (and civil religion) became such bases. The difference between Laserson’s 1912 Russian article and his 1939 Hebrew book was not merely related to the shift from Marxism to Jewish nationalism. It was also a reflection of the wider effort evident in the 1930s to find some form of nonpositivist theory of law that could serve as a foundation for the defense of beleaguered democracies50. 30 Thus, immediately after Laserson argued that the idea of a civil religion appeared in The Guide for the Perplexed, he said that this idea was now of extreme importance. The first modern democracies, Calvinist Geneva, England during the English Civil War, or France during the French Revolution, had a civil religion. This idea, however, was replaced in the 19th century by “ideological Manchesterism” that is, by the notion of ideological laissez faire. Now, only the anti-democratic states – the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany – had obligatory political ideologies, and these were based on the denial of civic freedom51. Contemporary democratic states have long ignored the need to pay attention to the beliefs and opinions of their citizens, but they are now forced (due to the threat of authoritarian, anti-democratic, regimes) to create a “legal credo” for their subjects, a new civil religion. In doing so, Laserson concluded his book, “they must rely not only on one of the last thinkers to mention the idea of [civil religion], Rousseau”, but also on one of the first thinkers who mentioned this idea, Maimonides 52. Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 8 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson 31 As previously noted, Laserson’s interest in Jewish law continued after his move to the United States. In 1942 he wrote an article in Yiddish on Saadia Gaon (whose thought he also discussed in his 1939 book), and in 1948 he published his short piece on “the Hebrew Roots of International Law”53. Perhaps the most interesting article on Jewish law written during his American period, however, was the one that was published posthumously in 1953, in which Laserson compared Thomas Hobbes with the biblical figure of Job. Here he described the Book of Job as epitomizing a higher stage of moral and legal thought, that of natural law, compared to Hobbes’s crass positivism, which ultimately led, according to Laserson, not just to the legal positivism of 19 th-century thinkers such as John Austin, but also, indirectly, to the Nazi state 54. In a sense, this article closed a circle. Laserson had opened his 1912 Russian article on natural law in ancient Hebrew literature with a quote from the Book of Job55. It was thus fitting that his last article should also discuss Job56. 32 While Laserson’s continued interest in Jewish law throughout his life reveals a stable element of his identity, that of a Jew, this identity coexisted with other identities that changed as he moved from place to place and as his audience changed. Thus, when he used the first-person plural in his works, its meaning changed over time. For example, in the Hebrew book on Maimonides he published in 1939, “we” referred to Jewish legal scholars57. However, when he moved to the United States, he sometimes used it to designate Americans, as in his book on the American impact on Russia, which he concluded by stating that the history of American diplomatic relations with Russia could have been much more effective “had our diplomats had a greater knowledge of” Russia58. This did not mean that by 1950 he saw himself as an American, at least if we are to believe John Alexander’s obituary, in which Alexander wrote that “on occasion, when speaking with a young colleague, he would cock his head, shake his finger and say: ‘Now, as an old European. I have to tell you my dear boy’”. 59 These shifting identities – Jewish, European, and American – illustrate the impact that forced travel had on Laserson’s identity, and also on his scholarship. III. Plus c’est la même chose 33 Although the influence of Laserson’s exiles can be seen in the changing languages (and identities) he used in his publications, the shifting balance between the topics he wrote on, the different theories he relied on in his works, and also sometimes the changes in the goals that motivated his writings, there were certain themes to which he returned time and again. In a shallow sense, such continuity resulted from the fact that, like other academic writers, he recycled many of his ideas, repeating the same idea in works published in several languages. For example, in an article from the 1920s on “Revolution and Law”, which was published in both Latvian and German and also appeared as a section of his 1930 Russian jurisprudence textbook, he claimed that there is always a gap between dynamic natural law on the one hand and positive law on the other hand, and that judges play a role in closing this gap, thus preventing revolutions60. The same idea also served as the basis for an article he published in English in a collection dedicated to Roscoe Pound, which appeared in the United States in 194761. 34 In a different sense, there was one major aspect of Laserson’s scholarship that seems to have been constant throughout his life, and which I will now discuss – his role as an Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 9 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson importer of foreign ideas to local audiences. In each of the different stages of his life, the local audience changed, and so did the place from which the ideas were imported, but in all stages, Laserson used his impressive linguistic abilities to position himself as an expert on foreign laws and societies. There was, however, a difference in the audience he wrote for in each place. In the two centers of Empires he lived in – St. Petersburg and New York – the audience was mostly local. In Russia this meant writing about foreign (German) law for a local Russian audience; in the United States this meant writing about foreign (Russian) history for a local American audience; in the two provincial towns he lived in during the interwar period – Riga and Tel Aviv – he wrote for local readers, but he also attempted to address a broader audience; in Latvia he wrote about Russian law for a central European audience; and in Palestine he wrote about Jewish law for an international community of legal philosophers whose hub was in France. 35 During his Russian period, Laserson introduced his Russian audience to German legal ideas. The works he wrote during the 1910s included articles on constitutional law, in which he discussed German and also Belgian constitutional theory and law 62, and articles on legal philosophy, in which he examined a major trend in turn-of-thecentury central European legal thought – the Free Law Movement, an anti-formalist approach which rejected the idea that codes could provide a comprehensive solution to every legal problem, and advocated the use of judicial discretion relying on the social science rather than on legal scholasticism to decide cases. In particular, Laserson presented a summary and critique of the ideas of some of the main proponents of this movement, such as Ernst Stampe and Hermann Kantorowicz63. 36 A 1913 article by Laserson dealt with another aspect of turn-of-the-century central European legal thought – the emergence of empirical approaches. This article, entitled “The Experimental-Psychological Method and Legal Modernism”, focused specifically on the empirical turn in German and Austrian legal science, comparing and contrasting it with Petrażycki’s approach. Laserson mentioned various attempts by central European scholars such as Eugen Ehrlich and Franz Kobler to introduce empirical methods to the study of law, that is, the collection of legal documents, the use of questionnaires, courtroom observations and psychological experiments, with the aim of discovering “living law”. He then argued that these attempts lacked a sound theoretical basis in legal psychology. Such a basis, he implied, could only be found in Petrażycki’s work, and it was the only means for really discovering the nature of popular legal consciousness64. 37 After Laserson’s move to Latvia in the early 1920s the main audience for his legal works was no longer found in the East, but in the West65. Laserson now turned himself into an expounder of late-imperial Russian legal thought targeting a German-speaking audience. An example of this change is his 1933 book on Russian legal philosophy, which was also simultaneously published as an article in the April 1933 issue of the Archiv für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie. The book was based on guest lectures that Laserson gave in Heidelberg in the summer of 1932 and included an introduction by Gustav Radbruch, the leading Weimar-period German legal philosopher, who was a professor at Heidelberg at the time. In this work, Laserson discussed the legal ideas of several groups of 19th – and early 20th – century Russian thinkers, focusing especially on two thinkers who, he argued, were the most original ones, Vladimir Solovyov and Leon Petrażycki. The book also included a chapter on Marxist legal theory (now viewing Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 10 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson Marxism more critically than in his youthful article on Jewish law from 1912). The book did not merely summarize the ideas of Russian and early Soviet thinkers but attempted to place them within the context of Russian history. The timing of its publication, immediately after the rise of Hitler to power, was, however, not propitious for a Jewish legal philosopher seeking scholarly attention in Germany. 38 When Laserson moved to Palestine in 1935, he made himself into an expert on the constitutional law of that territory. A long article written that summer was partly a scholarly discussion of the constitutional foundation of Mandatory Palestine and partly a political pamphlet meant to furnish legal arguments against the establishment of an elected legislative council in Mandatory Palestine, an institution that the Jews of Palestine feared would be dominated by the Arab population of the territory 66. The anti-democratic undertone of this work may seem somewhat puzzling given Laserson’s previous commitment to democracy in Russia and interwar Latvia, but perhaps it is less surprising given the precarious situation in which the Jews of eastern Europe found themselves in the late 1930s67. 39 Laserson marshaled an impressive list of sources and examples taken from various legal systems to buttress his argument that British rule in Palestine was subject to “international constitutional law”, and that the British were therefore constrained by this law. He specifically emphasized that the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922 prevented the British from reneging on their promise to govern Palestine as trustees serving the interest of the Jewish nation. Laserson’s argument relied on examples taken from the constitutional law of the UK, the United States, France, Germany, Spain, various colonies of the British Empire such as Ceylon, Kenya and the British West Indies, as well as the constitutional law of the Ottoman, Russian, AustroHungarian and Dutch Empires. He cited English scholars such as William Blackstone, William Stubbs, F. W. Maitland, and A. V. Dicey, French ones such as Georges Scelle, and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Dutch ones such as D. F. W. van Rees, and German ones such as Gerhard Leibholz68. 40 In the preface to this work Laserson explained to his intended audience, the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, that “our people” should study the legal aspects of the political challenges facing Zionism in Palestine, relying on experts in international, constitutional and administrative law. Laserson implied that he himself was such an expert and that his contribution to the debate was found in his ability to provide the Jews of Palestine with arguments taken from various foreign legal systems. 41 Finally, when Laserson moved to the United States, he became a translator of Russian ideas for an American audience. A clear example of this role is found in an article that he published in the Columbia Law Review several months before his death, in which he outlined some major aspects of Petrażycki’s thought, but also placed it in its wider intellectual context. This context was mainly German and Russian, but since the article was written for an American audience, Laserson also compared Petrażycki’s ideas to those of American legal realists such as Karl Llewellyn and Max Radin. He concluded the article with a call to Americans to adopt Petrażycki’s ideas, stating that “legal theories are more easily transplanted to foreign countries than codes and laws. And since in history we have repeatedly witnessed ‘receptions’ and transfers even of codes, why should not [Petrażycki’s] legal theory created in Europe be able to take roots in American soil?”69. Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 11 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson 42 The Columbia Law Review article was an example of Laserson’s effort to be a cultural intermediary, but it seems that at least with regard to Petrażycki’s thought, he had little success. While Petrażycki’s jurisprudence was deep, original and path-breaking, Laserson failed to persuade his American readers that it should indeed “take roots in American soil”70. Generally speaking, despite the efforts of Laserson and other American scholars interested in Petrażycki’s theory of law, this theory “remained almost unknown to the Anglo-Saxon and English-speaking world” 71. This may have been partly due to the fact that by the 1950s the social science approaches with which Petrażycki’s thought was associated were no longer in fashion in the United States. By contrast, Laserson’s work on Russian history, such as his book The American Impact on Russia, seems to have been more influential.72 43 Laserson was thus always an intermediary, importing and translating foreign ideas. Three aspects of his identity conditioned and facilitated this role: first, his birthplace, the Baltic territories of the Russian Empire, a borderland region, whose major cities served as trading entrepôts in which the various Baltic nationalities as well as Germans, Russians, and Jews met and interacted, creating a highly polyglot population (for example, in 1930 about 47 percent of the Jews of Latvia spoke four or more languages) 73. Second, his ethnic origin – the fact that he was a Jew, a minority nation that for many centuries had played the role of middlemen and experts in “cultural mediation” 74. Third, his profession, since in many cases, and certainly in heterogeneous societies, lawyers serve as “cultural translators and ethnographic intermediaries” 75. 44 Laserson may have left his birthplace but he remained rooted in it, writing about Jewish legal history for a Russian-speaking audience in the 1910s; about Russian legal theory for a German-speaking audience in the 1930s; or about the Soviet Union for an American audience in the 1940s. In this sense he resembled another, better-known, Jewish-Latvian-Russian intellectual, Isaiah Berlin, who was born in Riga two decades after Laserson, and who, as an Oxford don in the mid-20 th century, became famous for expounding the ideas of central and east European thinkers and movements to the Anglo-Saxon world. IV. Conclusion 45 Exiled from Latvia, Laserson arrived in Tel Aviv in 1935, when the city was witnessing a large wave of immigration of European Jews fleeing Nazism. The poet Leah Goldberg, who was born in Königsberg in East Prussia, grew up in the capital of interwar Lithuania, Kaunas, and then studied in Weimar Germany before she too emigrated to Palestine in 1935, eloquently captured the immigrants’ experience in her poem, “Tel Aviv 1935”: […] How could the air of the small city bear so many childhood memories, wilted loves, rooms which were emptied somewhere? Like pictures blackening in a camera, the clear cold nights reversed, rainy summer nights across the sea and shadowy mornings of great cities. And the sound of footsteps behind your back drum the marching songs of foreign troops, Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 12 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson and it seems – if you but turn your headthere is your hometown church floating on the sea76. 46 Goldberg’s poem describes the difficulty of abandoning one’s past, and one’s former identity as a European, in the new Jewish homeland in the Middle East. The last lines of the poem echo, perhaps, the biblical story of Lot’s wife, who escaped from Sodom but could not resist the temptation to look back while God destroyed her city, and was punished by being turned into a pillar of salt. The lesson of that story is that one should not look back when escaping a place of evil, but Laserson’s story offers a different lesson about one’s past. Laserson’s past as a non-Bolshevik intellectual doomed him in the new Soviet state. His identity as a Jewish social-democratic politician ultimately ended his political and academic careers in Latvia. But his past also saved him, enabling him to reinvent himself as an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union in the United States. His story thus teaches us, like countless other stories, about the ironies of fate. The unfortunate circumstances of his birthplace, Latvia, a multinational and polyglot territory, wedged uneasily during the interwar period between Soviet Communism and German Nazism, were also those circumstances that ultimately led to his scholarly salvation during the last decade of his life, after he moved to the United States. 47 Laserson’s life story was not unique. Many other exiled legal scholars of his generation experienced similar trajectories, having had to reinvent themselves due to emigration or forced exile. Here I would like to mention two specific groups. First, Laserson’s life echoed that of other east European Jewish lawyers, and in particular other Baltic Jewish legal scholars77. For example, Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian Jewish lawyer, politician, interwar minority rights activist, and international law scholar who founded the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York where Laserson worked during his American period78; Nathan Feinberg, another Lithuanian Jew who, like Laserson, was deeply involved in attempts to use the interwar minority-rights regime to protect Jewish interests in central and eastern Europe, and later become a professor of international relations and international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was also the first dean of its Faculty of Law79; or Benjamin Akzin, who was born in Riga, and studied law in interwar Vienna. Akzin obtained a doctorate in political science in Vienna, and a second doctorate, in international law, in Paris. He then moved to the United States, where he was active both in Zionist politics and in international law research, first at Harvard and then as a researcher for the American Congress in Washington DC. In 1949 Akzin emigrated to Israel and became a professor of political science and law at the Hebrew University80. 48 The second group is Petrażycki’s circle of students81. I already mentioned Sorokin, who ended up at Harvard; Timasheff, who became a professor at Fordham University in New York, and Gurvitch, whose academic career ultimately led to the Sorbonne. Other students of Petrażycki moved to more exotic locations. One example is George Constantine Guins, whose early life was somewhat similar to Laserson’s. He was born near Warsaw in 1887, and grew up in the Russian border town of Kishinev. He studied at St. Petersburg University, where he met both Sorokin and Laserson at Petrażycki’s seminar, and like Laserson, he then taught at St. Petersburg University as a Privatdozent, and also served, like Sorokin and Laserson, in a high-ranking government position after the February 1917 revolution. After the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution, however, Guins moved eastwards, to the city of Omsk in Siberia, and then to the Russified city of Harbin in China, where he established the Harbin Law School. He taught law in Harbin under Chinese and Japanese rule and published works on legal Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 13 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson theory. Just like Laserson, political changes (in his case, conflict with the Japanese rulers of the puppet state of Manchukuo) forced Guins to move to the United States in 1941, where he became, like Laserson, an expert on the Soviet Union 82. Of course, this circle can be extended to include other exiled interwar Russian legal scholars who moved to places such as Paris, Berlin, Belgrade and Prague 83. 49 Recovering the personal histories of these scholars and assessing the way their ideas did (or did not) change as a result of forced travel is not only of interest in itself but can also enable a better understanding of how the cataclysmic events of the first half of the twentieth century, which scattered European legal scholars in unforeseen ways all over the world, influenced modern legal thought not just in the West, but also beyond it, in territories such as the Middle East (Palestine) and the Far East (China). Such a history, documenting the role of political and military upheaval in the global spread of modern jurisprudence, is yet to be written. NOTES 1. See Pitirim Sorokin: Izbrannaia perepiska, ed. P. P. Krotov, Vologda, Drevnosti Severa, 2009, p. 45-48. The correspondence between Laserson and Sorokin is mentioned in E. V. Timoshina, “Psikhologicheskii realizm: M. Ia. Lazerson”, Pravovedenie, 316, 2014, p. 245-264, and analyzed in more detail in S. N. Kovalchuk, “Istorii iz perepiski P. A. Sorokina: Adresant/adresat Maks Lazerson”, Nasledie, 11 February 2017, p. 128-141. Laserson’s name was spelt differently in different languages: Matityahu Lazarson (Hebrew), Maks (Matisyahu) Lazerson (Yiddish), Maxim (or Maks) Iakovlevich Lazerson (Russian), Maksis Lazersons (Latvian), Max M. Laserson (English and German), and Max (or Maxime) Lazerson (French). 2. Sorokin: Izbrannaia perepiska, op. cit., p. 45; B. Akzin, Me-Rigah le-Yerushalyim: Pirkey Zikhronot, Jerusalem, ha-Sifriyah ha-Tsiyonit, 1989, p. 104-105; Central Zionist Archives, file A 388/11, Rudolph Hirschwald to Max Laserson, 19 May 1932. 3. Sorokin: Izbrannaia perepiska, op. cit., p. 45-47. Perhaps another factor influencing Laserson’s desire to leave Palestine was the Arab Revolt, which began in April 1936. 4. At a certain point Laserson sought Sorokin’s assistance in obtaining a position at the American University of Beirut. Ibidem, p. 51-52. 5. Ibid., p. 53-54. See also K. Graham, “The Refugee Jurist and American Law Schools, 1933-1941”, American Journal of Comparative Law, 50, 2002, p. 777-818. Many of these were, of course, Jews or of Jewish extraction. 6. For additional biographical information on Laserson see “[Obituary]: Max Laserson, Author, Educator”, New York Times, 1 December 1951, p. 9; J. Alexander, “Max M. Laserson: A Memoir”, Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, 2, 1953, p. 49-51; Yahadut Latviyah: Sefer Zikaron, eds. B. Eliav, M. Bobe and E. Kremer, Tel Aviv, Igud Yotsei Latviyah ve-Estoniyah beYisrael, 1952/3, p. 423-426; M. Beth, “Men and Deeds”, The Jews of Latvia, Tel Aviv, Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel, 1971, 285, p. 296-297. For more recent discussions see S. Kovalchuk, “Jewish Philosophy in Latvia in the 20s-30s: M. Vaintrob, M. Lazerson, M. ShatsAnin”, Jews in a Changing World: Materials of the First International Conference, Riga, August 28-29, 1995, eds. H. Branover and R. Ferber, Riga, M. Dubin Foundation, 1997, p. 84-89; Kovalchuk, “Istorii iz perepiski P. A. Sorokina”, op. cit., p. 128-141. See also S. Bērtaitis, “Maksis Lazersons: svarīgāka Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 14 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson par likumiem ir patiesā dzīve”, Jurista Vārds, 2018, 16, 17 April 2018, p. 20-29 (an article in Latvian discussing Laserson’s biography). Max Laserson is sometimes confused with his older brother, Maurice (Moisei) Laserson, who was also known by his pseudonym M. J. Larsons. On Maurice Laserson’s very colorful life see E. Kasinec, “Maurice Laserson (M. J. Larsons): A Note on His Diary and Pictures at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives”, Slavic & East European Information Resources, 21, 2020, p. 289-301. 7. A. Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia: The Missing Center, Washington DC, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996, p. 226-228; V. O. Lumans, Latvia in World War II, New York, Fordham University Press, 2006, p. 243. 8. See, e.g., K. Tuori, Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars and the Battle for the Future of Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 10-11, 20, 42, 71-83, 88. For a critique of some aspects of Tuori’s argument see T. Giaro, “Victims and Supporters of Nazism vis-à-vis Europe’s Legal Tradition: A New Episode in the History of the Third Reich?”, Forum Prawnicze, 6, 2020, p. 67-86. For a more poetic discussion of the impact of exile on intellectuals see D. Mendelsohn, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2020. For some examples of earlier works discussing 1930s exiled legal scholars see, e.g., Jurists Uprooted: German-Speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-century Britain, eds. J. Beatson and R. Zimmermann, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004; M. Rürup, “Legal Expertise and Biographical Experience: Statelessness, Migrants, and the Shaping of New Legal Knowledge in the Postwar World”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 43, 2017, p. 438-465; P. Lerner, “Leaving Home, Transplanting Law: Guido Tedeschi and Other Jewish Émigrés from Europe”, Studi Senesi, 130, 2018, p. 229-251. For some recent discussions of jurists as willing and unwilling travelers see F. Audren, A.-S. Chambost, and J.-L. Halpérin, Histoires contemporaines du droit, Paris, Dalloz, 2020, p. 267-280; V. Barnes and E. Whewell, “Judicial Biography in the British Empire”, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 28, 2021, p. 1-27; P. Bajon, V. Barnes and E. Whewell, “Global Legal Biography”, Comparative Legal History, 9, 2021, p. 127-153. For a general theoretical discussion of the relationship between biography and legal history see, e.g., D. Sugarman, “From Legal Biography to Legal Life Writing: Broadening Conceptions of Legal History and Socio-legal Scholarship”, Journal of Law and Society, 42, 2015, p. 7-33. 9. I chose to write about Laserson specifically because his biography provides an interesting case for the study of the impact of travel on scholarship given the fact that he was forced to move between four different legal systems during his life. I am also interested in his biography because of my broader interest in the history of early 20th century jurisprudence outside the West. See Assaf Likhovski, “A Colonial Legal Laboratory? Jurisprudential Innovation in British India”, American Journal of Comparative Law, 69, 2021, p. 44-91. 10. Laserson was a member (although not a leading one) of Petrażycki’s circle of students (the leading lights of that circle were three highly influential mid-20th century sociologists: Pitirim Sorokin, Georges Gurvitch and Nicholas Timasheff). Because of his association with Petrażycki, an analysis of his legal thought is sometimes found in works dealing with this circle. On Petrażycki and his students (including Laserson) see, e.g., K. B. Baum, Leon Petrażycki und seine Schüler: Der Weg von der psychologischen zur soziologischen Rechtstheorie in der Petrażyckigruppe, Berlin, Duncker and Humblot, 1967; A. Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, p. 213-290; Timoshina, “Psikhologicheskii realism”, op. cit., p. 245-264; T. Gizbert-Studnicki, K. Płeszka, and J. Woleński, “20 th Century Legal Theory and Philosophy in Poland”, A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, vol. 12, tome 1, eds. E. Pattaro and C. Roversi, Dordrecht, Springer, 2016, p. 547, 551-556; E. V. Timoshina, G. Lorini and W. Żełaniec, “Other Russian or Polish Legal Realists”, A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, vol. 12 tome 2, eds. E. Pattaro and C. Roversi, Dordrecht, Springer, 2016, p. 527-542; Peterburgskaia shkola filosofii prava: K 150-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Lva Petrazhitskogo, eds. A. V. Poliakov and E. V. Timoshina, St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg University Press, 2018; Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 15 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson Russian Legal Realism, eds. B. Brożek, J. Stanek and J. Stelmach, Cham, Springer, 2019. On the contemporary relevance of Petrażycki’s ideas see, e.g., R. Cotterrell, “Leon Petrażycki and Contemporary Socio-Legal Studies”, International Journal of Law in Context, 11, 2015, p. 1-16. 11. Laserson’s moves from Soviet Russia to Latvia, and from Palestine to the United States may not have been “exiles” in the strict sense of being barred from returning to one’s native country for political or punitive reasons. 12. On the notion of “borderland jurists”, See Audren, Chambost and Halpérin, op. cit., p. 270. 13. See M. Laserson, “Die russische Rechtsphilosophie”, Archiv für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie, 26, 1933, p. 289, 336-337; “Le-Vo’o shel Prof. Lazarson le-Erets Yisrael”, Do’ar ha-Yom, 14 March 1934, p. 3; “Laserson, Max”, Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 6, New York, The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, inc. [c1939-43], p. 537; Alexander, op. cit., p. 49-51, p. 49; Kasinec, op. cit., p. 13, note 1; S. Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014, p. 212. 14. See [M. Laserson], Bibliography of the Chief Works of Professor Max M. Laserson, Tel Aviv, n. p., 1937 (a copy is available at the National Library of Israel). A later version of this bibliography is [M. Laserson], Bibliography of the Chief Works of Max M. Laserson, New York, n. p., 1947 (a copy is available at the Archive of the Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel, item number P49-15f). An earlier bibliography with somewhat different entries is found in M. Lazerson, Obshchaia teoriia prava: vvedenie v izuchenie prava, Riga, zhizn i kultura, 1930, p. 381-383. On the exact date of Laserson’s departure from Russia cf. “Laserson, Max”, Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, op, cit. (mentioning 1920); Kasinec, op. cit., p. 13, note 1 (mentioning 1921). 15. M. Ia. Lazerson, “Estestvennoe pravo v pamiatnikakh drevne-evreiskoi literatury i zakonodatelstva”, Voprosy Prava, 11.3, 1912, p. 108-134; M. Ia. Lazerson, “Svobodnoe sudeiskoe usmotrenie”, Pravo, 1911.52, 31 December 1911, p. 2967-2973. 16. M. Ia. Lazerson, Sud i svoboda lichnosti, Riga, Nauka i zhizn, 1913; M. Ya. Lazerson, “Osnovaniia nachala organizatsii proportsionalnogo predstavitelstva v Belgii”, Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii, 23 April 1917, p. 105-125. 17. M. Ia. Lazerson, K mezhdunarodnoi postanovke evreiskogo voprosa, Petrograd, Ekonomiia, 1917. See also James Loeffler, “The Right to Banality: Interwar Zionism between Eastern Europe and the Middle East”, Nationalities Papers, forthcoming. 18. Sorokin: Izbrannaia perepiska, op. cit., p. 46. 19. D. H. Aldcroft, Europe's Third World: The European Periphery in the Interwar Years, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2016, p. 5, 12, 47, 94-95, 98-100. 20. [Laserson], Bibliography (1937), op. cit.; M. Ia. Lazerson, Pravo na banalnost: Opyt obosnovaniia trudovogo sionizma, Riga, Kultura, 1925. On the way Laserson reconciled Zionism and Jewish Diaspora politics see Loeffler, “The Right to Banality”, op. cit. On his role as a transnational activist of the interwar minorities regime see, e.g., D. J. Smith, M. Germane, and M. Housden, “Forgotten Europeans: Transnational Minority Activism in the Age of European Integration”, Nations and Nationalism, 25, 2019, p. 523–543. See also Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, file A 388/7, M. W. Royse to M. Laserson. 21. [M. Laserson], Bibliography (1937), op. cit. (listing works in Latvian on topics such as the constitutional legislation of Latvia, legal research in the Baltic States, dictatorship, election laws, and Spinoza, Grotius, and Jewish law). A detailed summary of Laserson’s activity in the Latvian parliament is found in M. M. Laserson, “Ha-Yehudim veha-Parlamentarizm ha-Latvi”, Yahadut Latviyah, op. cit., p. 30-105, 213. On the impact of the political situation of interwar Latvia on his theoretical works from this period see Baum, op. cit., p. 83-84. During this time, he also served as a member of the Municipal Council of Riga. See “Riga”, Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 9, New York, The Universal Jewish encyclopedia, inc., [c1939-43], p. 164. 22. [Laserson], Bibliography (1937), op. cit.; Lazerson, Obshchaia teoriia prava, op. cit. Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 16 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson 23. [Laserson], Bibliography (1937), op. cit.; M. Laserson, Recht, Rechtsseitigkeit und Geradheit: Versuch einer rechtsphilosophisch-linguistischen Klärung des Rechtsbegriffs, Berlin, Praeger, 1921; M. Laserson, Die russische Rechtsphilosophie, Berlin, Rothschild, 1933; M. Laserson, Roshia hōritsu tetsugakushi, translated by Toshitarō Matsuzaki, Tokyo, Sobunkaku, 1936. 24. Sorokin: Izbrannaia perepiska, op. cit., p. 45, 46. 25. Laserson attempted but was unable to obtain a position at the University of Latvia. Instead he was forced to teach at the Riga Commercial College (Rīgas Komercinstitūts), which was a nondegree-conferring private institution established during the interwar period. See Lexique International des Termes Universitaires, n. p., International Federation of University Women, 1939, p. 402, 404-406; Akzin, op. cit., p. 85, note 1. See also B. Siew, “Parshiyot”, Yahadut Latviyah, op. cit., p. 209, 213-214 (on antisemitism at the University of Latvia, Laserson’s failed attempt to obtain a position at the university, and the establishment of the Commercial College which, its Latvian opponents claimed, was created as a “refuge for Jews”). 26. See A. Likhovski, “Colonialism, Nationalism and Legal Education: The Case of Mandatory Palestine”, The History of Law in a Multicultural Society: Israel 1917–1967, eds. R. Harris et al., Dartmouth, Ashgate, 2002, p. 75–93; A. Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 27. Materials relevant to his teaching at Tel Aviv are found in the Tel Aviv University Archive. See e.g., Tel Aviv University Archive, Box 61.71, letter, 22 February 1937; Tel Aviv University Archive, Bar Shira Archive, file 3, Announcement no. 248, 6 June 1939, p. 3. 28. The pamphlet was published in Yiddish in Riga in 1922. It appeared in Laserson’s 1937 bibliography, but I was unable to locate a copy. See [Laserson], Bibliography (1937), op. cit. 29. M. Laserson, “Ha-Mandat ha-Erets Yisre’eli be-Tor Basis Konstitutsyoni bishvil Erets Yisrael”, Ha-Mishpat 5.2, October 1934, p. 3; M. Laserson, Ha-Mandat, ha-Konstitutsyah veha-Mo’etsah haMehokeket, Tel Aviv, Shtibel, 1935/6; M. M. Laserson, On the Mandate: Documents, Statements, Laws and Judgments Relating to and Arising from the Mandate for Palestine, Tel Aviv, Igeret, 1937. 30. Max Lazerson, “La philosophie du droit de Maïmonide”, Archives de philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique, 7, 1937, p. 191-219; M. M. Laserson, Ha-Filosofiyah ha-Mishpatit shel ha-Rambam, [Tel Aviv], Beyt ha-Sefer ha-Gavohah le-Mishpat vele-Kalkalah, 1939. 31. During his Palestinian period, he also began to prepare his move to the United States, publishing in 1939 an article in English in the American Sociological Review which was based on an earlier work in German. See M. M. Laserson, “Rights, Righthandedness, and Uprightness”, American Sociological Review, 4, 1939, p. 534-542. 32. M. M. Laserson, The Status of the Jews after the War: A Proposal for Jewish Demands at the Forthcoming Peace Conference, New York, Jewish Workers’ National Alliance, [1940]; M. M. Laserson, Der kamf fun demokratye far menshlekhe rekht, New York, Farband, 1942; M. Laserson, “Hekefah shel ha-Konstitusyah ha-Yisre’elit”, Bitsaron, August-September 1948, p. 328-332 (a copy is available at the Central Zionist Archives, file A 388/5); Laserson, “Ha-Yehudim”, Yahadut Latviyah, op. cit., p. 30-105; M. Laserson, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau vegn yidden”, YIVO Bleter: Journal of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, 16, 1940, p. 20-30; M. Laserson, “Di etishe filosofie fun Saadya Goen”, YIVO Bleter: Journal of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, 20, 1942, p. 257-263; M. Laserson, “A bisl baltishyidish geografye”, Yidishe Shprakh, 2, 1942, p. 84-87; M. Laserson, “The Legal Rehabilitation of Europe’s Jews”, The Reconstructionist, 10.4, 1944, p. 10-15; M. M. Laserson, “Hebrew Roots of International Law”, Menorah Journal, 36, 1948, p. 174-181; M. M. Laserson, “On the Making of the Constitution of Israel”, Jewish Social Studies, 14, 1952, p. 3-16. 33. M. M. Laserson, “The Recognition of Latvia”, American Journal of International Law 37, 1943, p. 233-247; Max M. Laserson, “On Universal and Regional Federalism”, Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, 2.1-2, October 1943, p. 82-93; J. Robinson, O. Karbach, M. M. Laserson, N. Robinson and M. Vichniak, Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure? New York, Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, 1943; M. M. Laserson, “Solving the Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 17 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson Minorities Problem by Legal Means”, Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, 3, 1944-1945, p. 51-68; Max M. Laserson, “The Jewish Minorities in the Baltic Countries”, Jewish Social Studies, 3, 1941, p. 273-84; M. M. Laserson, “On the Sociology of Ethics”, Journal of Philosophy, 40, 1943, p. 148-156; M. Laserson, “Positive and ‘Natural’ Law and Their Correlation”, Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies: Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pound, ed. Paul Sayre, New York, Oxford University Press, 1947, p. 434-449; Max M. Laserson, “Russian Sociology”, Twentieth Century Sociology, eds. G. Gurvitch and W. E. Moore, New York, Philosophical Library, 1945, p. 671-702; M. M. Laserson, “The Work of Leon Petrazhitskii: Inquiry into the Psychological Aspects of the Nature of Law”, Columbia Law Review, 51, 1951, p. 59-82; M. M. Laserson, “Democracy as a Regulative Idea and as an Established Regime: The Democratic Tradition in Russia and Germany”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 8, 1947, p. 342-362. 34. M. M. Laserson, “The Development of Soviet Foreign Policy in Europe, 1917-1942: A Selection of Documents”, International Conciliation, 21, 1943, p. 5-95; M. M. Laserson, “Two Polish Constitutions, 1921 and 1935”, Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, 4, 1945/1946, p. 27-52; M. M. Laserson, The Curzon Line: A Historical and Critical Analysis, New York, Carnegie Foundation, 1944; J. T. Shotwell and M. M. Laserson, Poland and Russia 1919-1945, New York, King’s Crown, 1945; M. M. Laserson, Russia and the Western World: The Place of the Soviet Union in the Comity of Nations, New York, Macmillan, 1945; M. M. Laserson, “Russia and the World: A Soviet Review of Diplomacy”, International Conciliation, 25, March 1947, p. 143-158. 35. M. M. Laserson, The American Impact on Russia: Diplomatic and Ideological, 1784-1917, New York, Macmillan, 1950; M. M. Laserson, “Alexander Radishchev – An Early Admirer of America”, Russian Review, 9, 1950, p. 179-186. 36. On his Jewish education see Yahadut Latviyah, op. cit., p. 424. Laserson’s interest in natural law was probably the result of the influence of Petrażycki’s thought. On the important role that natural law played in Petrażycki’s legal philosophy see Walicki, op. cit., p. 228-229, 263-264. On Laserson’s original contribution to the development of a Petrażyckian perspective on the notion of natural law see Timoshina, Lorini and Żełaniec, op. cit., p. 539-542. For discussions of natural law ideas in the thought of other 19th and early 20 th century Russian thinkers see Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia, eds. Paul Valliere and Randall A. Poole, Milton, Routledge, 2021. 37. On the Noahide laws see, e.g., Suzanne Last Stone, “Sinaitic and Noahide Law: Legal Pluralism in Jewish Law”, Cardozo Law Review, 12, 1991, p. 1157-1214; Steven Robert Wilf, The Law before the Law, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2008. 38. Lazerson, “Estestvennoe pravo”, op. cit., p. 119-120. 39. Laserson, Ha-Filosofiyah ha-Mishpatit, op. cit., p. 11-12, 23, 48-49, 61. 40. Laserson, “Hebrew Roots”, op. cit., p. 174-181. Another interesting discussion on the nonChristian roots of international law is found in a typewritten essay in Hebrew which Laserson wrote in 1939, and which discussed international relations in the ancient Near East. See Max Laserson, “Ha-Yahasim ha-Beyn Leumiyim shel ha-Mizrah ha-Karov (1450 lifney ha-Sfirah)”, Central Zionist Archives, file A 388/2. 41. Lazerson, “Estestvennoe pravo”, op. cit., p. 108-111, 116, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131. 42. Ibid., p. 109, 112-113, 118-119, 126-127, 129. 43. Ibid., p. 111, 118-119. 44. On this goal, shared by many scholars of Jewish law at the time see, most recently, A. Kaye, The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel, New York, Oxford University Press, 2020. 45. Lazerson, “La philosophie du droit”, op. cit., p. 191, 201, 208-209, 216. 46. Laserson, Ha-Filosofiyah ha-Mishpatit, op. cit., p. 5. 47. Ibid., p. 6, 8. 48. Ibid., p. 10-12. Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 18 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson 49. Ibid., p. 40-41, 50, 56-62. 50. See e.g., ibid., p. 58, citing G. Radbruch, “Le Relativisme dans la philosophie de droit”, Archives de philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique, 4, 1934, p. 105-110 (where Radbruch argued that a current parliamentary majority cannot establish a permanent dictatorship, since an underlying principle of democracy is that it cannot permanently abolish itself). 51. Laserson, Ha-Filosofiyah ha-Mishpatit, op. cit., p. 58. 52. Ibid., p. 62. In an earlier article Laserson made a similar argument: contemporary democracies could no longer abandon the political education of the younger generations but had to return to the idea of civil religion and find a middle way between the anarchy of a total lack of ideological content in their schools and the slavery (evident in totalitarian states) of an obligatory political religion. See M. Laserson, “La réalité du droit et la politique juridique”, IIe Annuaire de l'Institut International de Philosophie du Droit et de Sociologie Juridique: Droit, Morale, Mœurs, Paris, Sirey, 1935-1936, p. 235-246, 245. 53. M. Laserson, “Di etishe filosofie fun Saadya Goen”, YIVO Bleter: Journal of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, 20, 1942, p. 257-263; Laserson, “Hebrew Roots”, op. cit., p. 174-181. 54. M. Laserson, “Power and Justice: Hobbes Versus Job”, Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, 2, 1953, p. 52, 58. 55. Lazerson, “Estestvennoe pravo”, op. cit., epigraph. 56. The article on Job was preceded by an obituary by Laserson’s Columbia University colleague, John Alexander, who wrote that “one can only wonder at the source of the strength, resolution and underlying courage that allowed” Laserson to publish so much “in the face of the troubled life and chaotic world that was his”. Alexander then mentioned Laserson’s article on Job and compared Laserson’s life to that of Job, a comparison that may have been somewhat exaggerated, not just because most of Laserson’s Jewish contemporaries in eastern Europe had been murdered a decade earlier, but also because the lucky ones who managed to survive were not able to continue their lives and careers as successfully as Laserson. Alexander, op. cit., p. 49-51. 57. Laserson, Ha-Filosofiyah ha-Mishpatit, op. cit., p. 5. 58. Laserson, The American Impact, op. cit., p. 424. 59. Alexander, op. cit., p. 51. 60. M. Lazersons, “Revolucija un tiesības”, Tieslietu Ministrijas Vēstnesis, 9, 1926, p. 321-337; M. Laserson, “Revolution und Recht”, Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, 8, 1929, p. 553-570; Lazerson, Obshchaia teoriia prava, op. cit., p. 288-296. The relationship between law and revolution was, of course, also a concern of Soviet scholars and politicians. See, e.g., J. Burbank, “Lenin and the Law in Revolutionary Russia”, Slavic Review, 54, 1995, p. 23-44. 61. M. Laserson, “Positive and ‘Natural’ Law”, op. cit., p. 434-449. 62. M. Lazerson, “Dogmatika i politika v germanskom gosudarstvovedenii”, Iuridicheskii Vestnik, 14.2, 1916, p. 4-40; M. Lazerson, “Reforma partikuliarnogo izbiratelnogo prava v Germanii i kompetentsiia imperskikh organov”, Pravo, 1913.21, 29 May 1913, p. 1323-1332; Lazerson, “Osnovaniia”, op. cit.; M. Lazerson, “Gosudarstvo bez territorii”, Russkaia mysl 35.2, 1915, p. 89-92. 63. Lazerson, “Svobodnoe sudeiskoe usmotrenie”, op. cit. Such a critique was not unique. It characterized the approach of the journal, Pravo, which was established by Petrażycki’s students and saw the notion of free law as inapplicable to the Russian context, because in Russia (unlike Germany) the main problem was not the lack of judicial discretion, but the exact opposite – judicial arbitrariness, that is, the lack of certain and clear legal rules applied objectively to all litigants. See Walicki, op. cit., p. 220-221, 252. 284. On the Free Law Movement, see, e.g., J. E. Herget and S. Wallace, “The German Free Law Movement as the Source of American Legal Realism”, Virginia Law Review, 73, 1987, p. 399, 411-417. On the influence of the Free Law Movement on late-imperial Russian legal thought see also P. Vasilyev, “Revolutionary Conscience, Remorse and Resentment: Emotions and Early Soviet Criminal Law, 1917-22”, Historical Research, 90, 2017, p. 117, 121; P. Vasilyev, “A Revolutionary Feeling of Justice? Emotion Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 19 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson and Legal Judgement in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia”, Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 9, 2019, p. 596, 596-601 (mentioning a 1914 article on the movement by another “Latvian” Jew, Isaak Shteinberg, who in 1917-1918 briefly became the People’s Commissar of Justice). See generally P. Vasilyev, “Beyond Dispassion: Emotions and Judicial Decision-Making in Modern Europe”, Rechtsgeschichte-Legal History, 25, 2017, p. 277-285. 64. M. Lazerson, “Eksperimentalno-psikhologicheskii metod i iuridicheskii modernism”, Vestnik prava i notariata, 6.29, 1913, p. 869-875. Laserson also published book reviews of recent Germanlanguage books. See, e.g., “Bibliografiia: G. A. Wielikowski, Die Neukantianer in der Rechtsphilosophie. München, 1914”, Pravo, 1914.17, 27 April 1914, p. 1424-1426. He was also involved in the translation from German of a three-volume work by a German legal scholar, Julius Karl Hatschek. See Iu. Gachek, Obshchee gosudarstvennoe pravo na osnove sravnitelnogo pravovedeniia, vols. 1, 2, 3, Riga, Nauka i zhizn, 1913. 65. It should be noted that during his Russian period he did write one review of a book by a Russian legal thinker for a German audience. See M. Laserson, “[Book Review]: L. v. Petrażycki: Über die Motive des Handelns und über das Wesen der Moral und des Rechts”, Zeitschrift für das Privat- und Öffentliche Recht der Gegenwart, 40, 1914, p. 735-744. 66. Laserson, Ha-Mandat, op. cit. On the Legislative Council see, e.g., A. Likhovski and A. Shahal, “The History of Israeli Pre-State Constitutionalism”, The Oxford Handbook of Israeli Constitutionalism, eds. A. Barak et al., forthcoming. 67. It also reflected a deeper current in Laserson’s thought on Jewish nationalism which saw Palestine as the necessary metropole of a transnational nation whose members were mostly located in Europe. See Loeffler, “The Right to Banality”, op. cit. 68. Laserson, Ha-Mandat, op. cit. 69. See Laserson, “Work of Leon Petrazhitskii”, op. cit., p. 59, 62, 79, 82. Laserson was not the first person to introduce English-speaking readers to Petrażycki’s thought. See A. Kojder, “Leon Petrażycki’s Socio-legal Ideas and Their Contemporary Continuation”, Journal of Classical Sociology, 6, 2006, p. 333, 346 (containing a list of works in English on Petrażycki from the 1930s onward). 70. I found only 22 citations of this specific article in Google Scholar, and 6 in HeinOnline. 71. A. W. Rudzinski, “Petrażycki's Significance for Contemporary Legal and Moral Theory”, American Journal of Jurisprudence, 21, 1976, p. 107. 72. I found 15 reviews and 90 citations of this book using the Harvard University Library catalogue and Google Scholar. 73. P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia , Oxford, Polity Press, 2012, p. 207 (on “frontier zones” as “the locus of cultural encounters, collisions and translations, often producing new knowledge and new ideas”); Ezergailis, op. cit., p. 399 (providing statistics on the polyglot nature of much of the population of interwar Latvia). See also Lauri Mälksoo, “F.F. Martens and His Time: When Russia Was an Integral Part of the European Tradition of International Law”, European Journal of International Law, 25, 2014, p. 811, 819-820 (discussing the life and identity of another Baltic borderland jurist, the Estonian-Russian international lawyer Friedrich Fromhold von (or Fyodor Fyodorovich) Martens). 74. Y. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 11, 42, 116-119, 127 (on Jews as “middleman minority” with an expertise in “cultural mediation”). 75. M. Sharafi, “A New History of Colonial Lawyering: Likhovski and Legal Identities in the British Empire”, Law and Social Inquiry, 32, 2007, 1059, 1061 (on lawyers as translators and cultural intermediaries). 76. L. Goldberg, Selected Poetry and Drama, translated by R. Ts. Back and T. Carmi, New Milford, CT, Toby Press, 2005, p. 134. 77. On exiled interwar east European Jewish legal scholars see, e.g., A. Likhovski, “Peripheral Vision: Polish-Jewish Lawyers and Early Israeli Law”, Law and History Review, 36, 2018, p. 235-266; Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 20 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson J. Loeffler, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019. 78. See, e.g., O. Kaplan-Feuereisen, “At the Service of the Jewish Nation: Jacob Robinson and International Law”, Osteuropa, 58.8, 2008, p. 279-94; The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, eds. E. Bendikaitė and D. R. Haupt, Sankt Augustin, Academia, 2015; Rürup, “Legal Expertise”, op. cit.; Rotem Giladi, Jews, Sovereignty, and International Law: Ideology and Ambivalence in Early Israeli Legal Diplomacy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021. 79. See, e.g., N. Feinberg, Pirkey Hayim ve-Zikhronot, Jerusalem, Mabat, 1985. 80. Akzin, op. cit. 81. For a discussion of this circle (from the perspective of legal philosophy rather than intellectual history) see, e.g., Baum, op. cit.; Walicki, op. cit., p. 283-89; M. Antonov, “Russian Legal Philosophy in the 20th Century”, in A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, vol. 12 tome 1, eds. E. Pattaro and C. Roversi, Dordrecht, Springer, 2016, p. 587, 599-600; Peterburgskaia shkola filosofii prava, op. cit.; J. Stanek, “Between Psychology and Sociology: The Continuators of Psychological Legal Theory”, Russian Legal Realism, op. cit., p. 159-176. 82. See “Gins (Guins), Georgii Konstantinovich”, Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926, ed. J. D. Smele, London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, p. 457-458; “Guins, Georgii Konstantinovich”, The Russian Diaspora 1917-1941, eds. B. Raymond and D. R. Jones, Lanham, Scarecrow Press, 2000, p. 116-117; B. Raymond, Interview with George C. Guins, Berkeley, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library-Regional Oral History Office, 1966, p. vi-vii, 22, 60. 83. See, e.g., I.A. Isaev “Russkaia iuridicheskaia nauka za rubezhom (20-e nachalo 30-kh godov)”, Russkoe zarubezhe: istoriia i sovremennost, 5, 2016, p. 5-14; D. Kévonian, “André Mandelstam and the Internationalization of Human Rights (1869–1949)”, Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights, eds. Pamela Slotte and Miia Halme-Toumisaari, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 239, 252, 263-265. ABSTRACTS The life of the Jewish-Russian-Latvian-American legal scholar Max Laserson was punctuated by emigration and exile. This article explores the impact that this experience had on his scholarship. While Laserson’s audience and research topics changed as he moved from place to place, his origins as both a Jew and a native of Latvia, a borderland region between East and West, influenced his scholarship throughout his life. Wherever he lived, he became a “borderland jurist”, an intermediary who transplanted foreign ideas to a local audience. La vie du juriste juif, russe, letton et américain Max Laserson a été ponctuée par l’émigration et l’exil. Cet article explore l’influence de cette expérience sur ses travaux académiques. Alors que son lectorat et ses sujets de recherche ont évolué au fur et à mesure de ses déplacements, ses origines juives et sa naissance en Lettonie, une région frontalière entre l’est et l’ouest, ont influencé ses recherches tout au long de sa vie. Où qu’il vive, il se présente comme un « juriste frontalier », un intermédiaire ayant transplanté des idées étrangères dans un milieu local. Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 21 The Many Exiles of Max Laserson INDEX Chronological index: exil, immigration, juriste frontalier, transplants juridiques, pensée juridique Keywords: exile, immigration, borderland jurists, legal transplants, legal thought AUTHOR ASSAF LIKHOVSKI Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law [email protected] Clio@Themis, 22 | 2022 22