Rachel Noah wins award

Green Templeton College DPhil Scholar Rachel Noah (DPhil Criminology, 2019) has won the prestigious Emil Zola Chair for Human Rights’ Halperin Award for Human Rights Research and Cause Lawyering in Israel.

Rachel, together with co-author and former manager in the Israeli Public Defence Office Maya Rosenfeld, wrote ‘(No)-Parole Committees? An Empirical Study of Parole in Israel’, published in early 2021 in the law journal Hukim.

Their work studies the reasons for Israel’s limited use of parole by analysing 346 cases, considering the prisoners’ background and the parole committees’ reasoning for their decision. The article provides a number of recommendations for increasing the use of parole in Israel, in light of the governments’ general efforts to decreased the country’s incarcerated rate.

Rachel Noah is a defence counsel and worked for several years in the private sector and as a member of the in-house staff of the Israeli Public Defence Office before starting her DPhil.

The award committee included senior Israeli jurists and the Former President of the Supreme Court of Israel, Justice Dorit Beinisch. It described their work as ‘an excellent combination of cause lawyering with innovative research that includes accessible reflective academic writing with the potential to create a positive impact’.

The award comes with a prize of $10,000 that the authors will share.

Green Templeton congratulates Rachel on this great milestone!