Faculty

Delving Beneath Doctrine

Drawing on a life lived across cultures, Professor Rephael Stern teaches students to question assumptions and see the law through a comparative lens.

“Moving between cultures allowed me to see things that other people weren’t seeing,” says Stern, who is fluent in Hebrew and proficient in Arabic. During his time in Jordan, he observed surprising similarities between Israeli and Jordanian culture—the food, the bustling souks (open-air markets), the combination of hospitality and brashness, concern about water security, the importance of religion, and the mutual suspicion with which the two societies regard one another—that challenged his belief that the countries were starkly incongruous.

In Israel, Stern had attended an all-boys yeshiva (a traditional Jewish educational institution) for high school and was “surrounded by people who spoke about the world in quite religious and dogmatic ways,” he recalls. But during his time in Jordan, Stern experienced a lifting of that veil of otherness. “I remember being in a class with Jordanians who were talking about gender roles, marriage, and feminism, and thinking that if I closed my eyes—and changed the language from Arabic to Hebrew—I would have felt like I was among Israeli religious peers.”

Stern’s experience of having “two origin stories” shifted his view of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. “It was more complicated than I had thought as a teenager,” he says. “There are similarities that go underexplored between Israel and Arab states because, for a variety of political reasons, no one wants to think they’re similar.”  

More than anything, this awareness of how politics can shape and sometimes distort cultural beliefs informs Stern’s current scholarship in administrative, constitutional, and comparative law. Stern has written about the uneasy history of belligerent occupation of Palestine by Israel, and how Great Britain’s legal framework has formed the foundation of the current American administrative state and the thorny balance of power between Congress and the executive.

“The benefit of the comparative lens is that it forces us to question our own assumptions,” Stern explains. “I like finding similarities where people don’t think to look, but that can be disquieting and uncomfortable. Comparisons can be subversive because they are a way of questioning the reality.”

Stern grew up in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago as the second of three boys. His father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and his mother was a social worker and early childhood teacher. The family moved to West Jerusalem in Israel when Stern was 11 to be closer to family and a more observant Jewish community. 

As a teen, Stern was an avid baseball player, which he says kept him close to his American roots. He also volunteered as an ambulance EMT and found he enjoyed both the adrenaline rush and the reward of helping people. He decided to become a doctor.

In 2007, Stern returned to the US to attend Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He played college baseball and embarked on a pre-med major, but his enthusiasm for medicine soon waned. Thanks to a few captivating professors, Stern found his passion while studying Middle Eastern history. After graduating from Brandeis with a bachelor’s in history, Stern spent a year living in Jordan and learning Arabic in preparation for a career as a Middle East historian.

Stern returned to the US and earned a master’s in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, before completing a dual JD/PhD graduate program at Harvard, where he won the Irving Oberman Memorial Prize for Constitutional Law as well as the Israeli History and Law Association Best Article Prize.

Stern also clerked for the late Honorable Bruce M. Selya on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. After years of academic scholarship, Stern was moved to witness the making of doctrinal decisions firsthand. “I got to see how politics and the law were not simply internal factors but had real world considerations.” 

In 2024, Stern joined BU Law’s faculty as an associate professor. “It was a dream come true,” he says. “My kids are all Bostonians, and we love Boston.” Stern and his wife, Heddy, an AI project manager for Dell, have four children under the age of 10. Ever the baseball fanatic, Stern’s favorite way to recharge is coaching his kids’ softball and baseball teams. He also wakes up before dawn each morning to make lunches and get his kids on their way to school. “In case any of my students think an 8:30 am class is early, try getting up at 4 am,” he jokes.

Although Stern’s academic lens is historical, he does not identify as an originalist. He views his job as helping students to understand that studying legal history “has a clear and present stake, but it’s not dispositive,” he says. “Looking at history gives us a sense of the options and choices, but I don’t think we are beholden to past decisions.”

As a professor of both property and administrative law, Stern wants his students to delve beneath the doctrine to understand the underlying import. “Administrative law can be heavy on procedure, and much of property law reads like arcane doctrine,” he explains. “The way I try to teach is to show there are clear, normative stakes. For example, the history of property law in this country brings to the fore questions of race, class, and gender and has clear implications for how we treat discrimination in the present.”

As his students progress in their careers, Stern hopes they will, as he did, find ways to push the boundaries of the familiar and broaden their perspectives. “In law, there is an ability to move across fields and try different roles,” he advises. “You can be on the defense side or the plaintiff side or go into government. Move between different spaces. Embrace the opportunity to reinvent yourself.”