Dr. Meital Pinto

Dr. Meital Pinto is a senior lecturer and Dean of the School of Law at Zefat Academic College. She holds a bachelor’s degree in law and government, a master’s degree in law and a doctorate in law from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, where she studied minority rights through the lens of political theories of multiculturalism and equality. In the past, she served as an intern in Justice Grunis’ office at the Supreme Court. Dr. Pinto served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University. She is an expert in constitutional and administrative law, and in the philosophy of law.

Selected Publications

• “Who Owns the House”? Group Rights in the Age of Populism: Jewish Ownership of Symbolic and Geographic Space in Israel” 7(1) Cardozo Int’l & Compar. L. Rev. 215 (2024).
• “Introduction: Shaming: Definition, Historical Origins and Contemporary Proliferation of an Illusiveness Concept, in The Legal Aspects of Shaming: An Ancient Sanction in The Modern World 2-27 (Meital Pinto and Guy Seidman eds., Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2023) (With Guy Seidman).
• “Epistemic Equality: Distributive Epistemic Justice in The Context of Justification” 32(2) Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 173-203 (2022) (With Boaz Miller).
• “Arbitrariness as Discrimination” 34 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 391 (2021).
• “The Fate of Arabic in Israel” in Oxford Handbook of the Israeli Constitution (Aharon Barak, Barak Medina and Yaniv Roznai eds., forthcoming, 2025).
• “The Impact of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People on the Status of the Arabic Language in Israel” 30 Minnesota Journal of International Law 1 (2020).
• “The Right to Culture, the Right to Dispute, and the Right to Exclude: A New Perspective on Minorities within Minorities” 28 Ratio Juris 521-539 (2015) (peer-reviewed).
• “The Absence of the Right to Culture of Minorities within Minorities in Israel: A Tale of a Cultural Dissent Case” 4 Laws 579–601 (2015) (peer-reviewed).
• “Taking Language Rights Seriously” 25 King’s Law Journal 231-254 (2014) (peer-reviewed).
• “Philosophy of Language Policy” in Bernard Spolsky ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy 37-58 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) (With Denise Réaume).
• “Property and Belongingness: Rethinking Gender-Biased Disinheritance” 21(1)Texas Journal of Women and the Law 119- 152 (2011) (With Shelly Kreiczer-Levy).
• “What are Offences to Feelings Really about?” 30(4)Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 695-723 (2010) (peer-reviewed).
• ‎”On the Intrinsic Value of Arabic in Israel – Challenging Kymlicka on Language Rights” ‎‎20(1) The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 143-172 (2007) (peer-‎reviewed). ‎