Ron Harris

Professor Ron Harris is a legal historian whose work has helped establish legal history as a substantial field of scholarship in Israel. His research connects the development of legal institutions, business organizations, and economic systems with the social realities those systems create. Alongside his academic career at Tel Aviv University, he has addressed practical questions concerning consumer credit, debt enforcement, bankruptcy, insolvency, and mortgages—areas in which legal rules directly affect debtors, families, creditors, and the public interest.

From economic history to Israeli law

Harris was born in Jerusalem and grew up in the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood. After completing his military service between 1978 and 1982, he studied law and general history at Tel Aviv University. During his training he worked at the Tel Aviv District Court, including in the field of corporate dissolution, and at the law offices of Igael Arnon, where he specialized in taxation. He also pursued advanced studies in history, focusing on the Industrial Revolution and British imperialism.

In 1989 he went to New York and earned a doctorate in history at Columbia University. His dissertation examined the development of business corporations during Britain’s Industrial Revolution. He joined Tel Aviv University’s Buchmann Faculty of Law in 1993 and became a full professor in 2008. Over the course of his career he has been a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University, the London School of Economics, the École Normale Supérieure, and other institutions. He has also held research fellowships at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study.

Research across law, economics, and history

Harris’s principal field is the legal and economic history of business organizations, especially the corporation. He has studied the English and Dutch East India Companies, the South Sea Bubble, unincorporated companies, partnership governance, freedom of incorporation, limited liability, and the emergence of the private company. His work shows how legal rules and economic needs shaped one another, and how institutions now taken for granted developed through experimentation, conflict, and changing social arrangements.

His book Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844, published by Cambridge University Press in 2000 and later translated into Japanese, examined the relationship between entrepreneurship, business organization, and legal development in England. His articles have addressed the private origins of the private company, the international history of limited-liability companies, the interaction between economic and legal history, and the ways legal innovation defines the boundaries between private and public domains.

A second major area of his work is the history of Israeli law. Harris has examined company law and enforcement law during the British Mandate, as well as the first three decades of the State of Israel: the development of constitutional law, the place of Jewish law, the court system, and the appointment of judges. His book The Israeli Legal System: The Formative Years, 1948–1977 traces the creation of Israeli law during a period when the new state had to build functioning institutions from inherited traditions, enacted law, and rapidly changing social needs.

His other books include Beside the Bed of Justice: Hayyim Zadok and the edited volume The History of Law in a Multi-Cultural Society: Israel, 1917–1967, prepared with Sandy Kedar, Pnina Lahav, and Assaf Likhovski. His scholarship also extends to property law, patent law, constitutional law, and the theoretical and methodological study of legal institutions.

Building legal history in Israel

Harris has been an institution builder as well as a scholar. Together with Professor Assaf Likhovski, he helped establish legal history as a recognized field at the law faculty and in Israel more broadly. They organized a workshop for presenting research in the field, helped establish the Israeli Society for History and Law, and worked to preserve archival documents relating to legal figures and institutions. This work created an intellectual and documentary foundation for understanding Israeli law not only through statutes and judgments, but also through the people, institutions, and circumstances that produced them.

With Professor Ariel Porat, Harris established the joint Tel Aviv University–Northwestern University master’s program in public law. He also founded and directed the David Berg Institute for Law and History. These initiatives expanded opportunities for advanced training and research while connecting Israeli legal scholarship with international academic networks.

Leadership at Tel Aviv University

Harris served as vice dean of the Faculty of Law from 2006 to 2008 and as dean of the Buchmann Faculty of Law from 2012 to 2017. During his deanship he developed international programs and strengthened connections with universities in India and China. He also led the development of a new undergraduate program intended to broaden the student body through mentoring and inclusion initiatives for Arab students, as well as a special admissions track for students educated in ultra-Orthodox institutions.

His leadership also included advancing the construction of an additional faculty building. The combination of physical development, international partnerships, and measures designed to widen access to legal education strengthened the faculty as a center of research and professional training in Israel and abroad.

Research with consequences for debtors and families

Harris’s work has moved from legal history into contemporary law, particularly consumer credit, mortgages, bankruptcy, and enforcement. He has studied how psychological biases affect consumers’ borrowing decisions, how mortgage structures differ across countries, and what contributed to the United States mortgage crisis of 2007. These studies examine not only formal rules, but also the behavior and economic conditions behind them.

In Hebrew articles such as From Imprisonment to Discharge: A New Agenda for Legislation on the Enforcement of Obligations, The Fall and Rise of Debtors’ Imprisonment, and From a Sound Transaction to a Global Crisis: The Failures of the American Mortgage Market, he explored how the rights of creditors can be balanced with the ability of debtors and their families to maintain a dignified life. His comprehensive proposal for reforming enforcement and bankruptcy law helped inspire the enactment of Israel’s Insolvency and Economic Rehabilitation Law.

Harris has also participated in public policy work. He collaborated with the Ministry of Justice, the Official Receiver, the Enforcement and Collection Authority, members of the Knesset, and civil-society organizations, and organized the first annual conference devoted to the subject. He chaired a committee appointed by the Official Receiver, Professor David Hahn, to recommend standards for repayment and economic-rehabilitation plans. The committee sought to increase debt repayment while taking account of a debtor’s earning capacity and the basic needs of the debtor’s family.

One of the committee’s most practical contributions was a new method for calculating essential living expenses when setting monthly payments for debtors. The method explicitly recognized the need for a decent standard of living rather than measuring the case solely by collection capacity. In this way, Harris connected academic research with decisions affecting people facing serious financial difficulty.

Why this legacy belongs in Moreshet

Ron Harris merits inclusion in the archive because his work operates in three mutually reinforcing spheres: he has investigated the historical roots of law and economic organization, built institutions that gave legal history a durable place in Israel, and helped shape policy affecting debtors, families, and the justice system.

His contribution to Jewish and Israeli heritage is especially visible in his writing on the formative years of Israeli law, the place of Jewish law, and the development of the state’s institutions. His wider contribution lies in research on corporations, limited liability, credit, and insolvency—subjects that shape the lives of communities and economies around the world. For Moreshet, Ron Harris represents the productive connection between historical knowledge and public responsibility. Moreshet.com preserves his legacy as an example of a scholar who turned legal research into tools for understanding society and improving its institutions.