Eugene Kontorovich

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School and a scholar at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, and has become the foremost legal scholar making the affirmative international law case for Israel's position on settlements, sovereignty, and territorial disputes — the rare academic whose work is specifically cited to rebut the international legal consensus used against Israel rather than simply to reinforce existing pro-Israel political arguments. Trained at the University of Chicago Law School, where he earned his JD, Kontorovich built a scholarly reputation working at Northwestern Law School before joining George Mason, focusing on constitutional law and international law with a particular specialization in the law of territorial disputes and state succession. His move toward Israel-focused international law scholarship was deliberate — he identified the international law arena as where the most consequential and least-contested anti-Israel case was being made, and set out to build the systematic rebuttal.

Kontorovich's central legal argument is that international law, properly read, does not prohibit Israeli settlements in the West Bank or Israeli sovereignty claims in the Golan Heights — and that the selective application of legal principles to Israel represents a double standard not applied to any comparable territorial situation globally. He has testified before Congress on these matters and his analysis has been cited in State Department and executive branch legal assessments during the Trump administration, including in the Secretary of State's 2019 pronouncement that the United States no longer considered Israeli settlements "inconsistent with international law." His work with the Kohelet Policy Forum has translated academic legal argument into policy advocacy with direct effect on Israeli government positions and U.S. policy debates about Israeli sovereignty and settlements.

Beyond settlements, Kontorovich has produced scholarship on universal jurisdiction, law-of-war applications to asymmetric conflict, and the legal frameworks governing Palestinian Authority obligations — each area where he has argued that the pro-Palestinian legal case relies on misapplied or invented legal norms. His op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Mosaic have made these arguments accessible to general audiences. At Rank 84, Kontorovich is the academic who does the hardest legal work in the pro-Israel space — taking on the international law scholars and institutions whose anti-Israel conclusions have the appearance of objective legal authority, and demonstrating with rigorous scholarship why those conclusions do not hold.