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Michael J. Broyde

Professor of Law, Director of the SJD Program, Berman Projects Director at Center for the Study of Law and Religion
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Areas of Expertise

Jewish Law, Law & Religion, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Family Law


Courses

Family Law I, Family Law II, Professional Responsibility, Bankruptcy Law, Alternative Dispute Resolution


Biography

Michael J. Broyde is professor of law at Emory University School of Law, the director of the SJD Program, and Berman Projects Director at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He is also a core faculty member at the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory.

His primary areas of interest are law and religion, Jewish law and ethics, family law, and comparative religious law.

Broyde returns to Emory Law from a three-semester sabbatical.

During the 2018-2019 academic year, Broyde was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Hebrew University and in the Fall 2019 semester, he was a visiting professor of Law at Stanford University School of Law, where he taught Jewish Law.

His most recent books are Setting the Table: An Introduction to the Jurisprudence of Rabbi Yechiel Mikhel Epstein’s Arukh HaShulhan (Academic Studies Press, 2021, co-authored with Shlomo Pill of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion), Sex in the Garden: Consensual Encounters Gone Bad in Genesis (Wifpf & Stock, 2019), Sharia Tribunals, Rabbinical Courts, and Christian Panels: Religious Arbitration in America and the West (Oxford Press, 2017) and A Concise Code of Jewish Law for Converts (Urim, 2017). He has written or edited thirteen books -- his next two books hopefully will be (1) Splitting Hairs: The History, Law, and Future of Jewish Laws of Modesty and Women’s Head Covering (ben Yehuda Press) and (2) Jewish Law and International Law: Sovereignty and Exogenous Authority in a Trans-national World (Oxford, 2022).  

In addition to his many books, Broyde has written more than 250 articles and book chapters on various aspects of law and religion, Jewish law, and religious ethics, as well as an often-cited article on impeachment in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He has written on military ethics from a Jewish law view, marriage and divorce in the Jewish tradition, bioethical dilemmas from a religious view, women’s rights in the Jewish tradition, the general relationship between secular and Jewish law in its many different facets, and many other topics. A list of his works may be found on his website.

Broyde is ordained (yoreh yoreh ve-yadin yadin) as a rabbi by Yeshiva University and was a member (dayan) of the Beth Din of America, the largest Jewish law court in America, where he once served as director while on leave from Emory. He was the Founding Rabbi of the Young Israel synagogue in Atlanta, a founder of the Atlanta Torah MiTzion kollel study program. He served on boards of many schools and organizations in Atlanta, including more than 15 years as the chair of the medical ethics committee of Weinstein Hospice in Atlanta.

Besides Stanford and Hebrew University, Broyde has been a visiting professor at many other places, most recently the University of Warsaw Law School in Poland and in the Interdisciplinary College of Law in Herzliya, Israel.

He received a juris doctor from New York University and published a note on its law review. He also clerked for Judge Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Broyde is married to labor lawyer Channah S. Broyde, who works in the United States Department of Labor, Office of the Solicitor.

Education: New York University School of Law, JD 1988; Yeshiva University: Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, Ordination 1991; Yeshiva University: Yeshiva College, BA, cum laude 1984