JCL 4:2 205 gad barzilai and ilan peleg Engineering the Law and Justice Deconstruction: Ideologies of Knowledge in Law and Politics in Israel and Beyond GAD BARZILAI AND ILAN PELEG ∗ Professional knowledge is produced and transmited in the context of state and societal relationships. Academic knowledge, including the study of law, is no exception and should be explicated as an articulation, construction and de-construction of embedded social rifts around fundamental issues, like nationality, ethnicity, religion and social class. It is an avenue through which ideologies may be generated and challenged. Scholars have ordinarily addressed diferences between hegemonic knowledge that serves the ruling elite and prevailing national ideologies, and counter-hegemonic knowledge that is supposed to challenge it. This article goes deeper by focusing on the lenses through which legal experts and legal academics perceive their profession and how the atributes they assign to it afect the knowledge they construct and articulate in the constitutive context of state-society relationships. The purpose of this article is to explore, analyse and theorise how scholars of law, state and society perceive the ‘state’ and how they conceptualize the meaning of ‘the rule of law’. We propose to analyse the epistemologies and ideologies of scholars of law and politics and to unveil the socio-political ‘genome’ that is immersed in their studies. We show that knowledge of law and politics not only constitutes a set of arguments about the state, but is also embedded in more fundamental ideologies and epistemologies about the ‘rule of law’. The literature on legal knowledge has increased in recent years, underscoring how the legal knowledge of individuals and groups has been constructed and afected by the legal ield and its cultural practices. 1 This article adds a signiicant dimension through shifting ∗ Gad Barzilai: Jackson School of International Studies; Comparative Law and Society Studies Center; Law, Societies and Justice Program; University of Washington; Ilan Peleg: Lafayete College. The authors would like to thank Ms Lee Varshavsky from the Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University, Mr Justin Antonello and Mr Benji Berlow from Lafayete College, and Ms Darby L Beck from University of Washington for their technical assistance during the research and completion of this article. 1 Ewick, P and Silbey, SS (1998) The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life University of Chicago Press; Gibson, LJ (2004) Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? Russell Sage Foundation; McCann,