UKLFI Charitable Trust iheld a webinar on "Institutional Investors, Israel Boycotts, and American Law”  with Professor David H Webber of Boston University, Chaired by Natasha Hausdorff on 19 December 2022 .

Activists hostile to Israel are increasingly pressing institutional investors to divest from Israeli companies or companies that maintain links with Israel. Whether styled as a perverse form of socially-responsible investment or even as a form of speech, the purpose of this pressure is to economically isolate the Jewish State. But is it legal for an institutional investor to boycott Israel? This webinar, by a leading expert on institutional investment law,  examined the position under the laws governing the world’s largest investment market.

Professor David H. Webber is Professor of Law and Paul M Siskind scholar at Boston University School of Law. . He also co-teaches the Pensions and Capital Stewardship course for the Harvard Trade Union program at Harvard Law School. He is the author of The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon, published by Harvard University Press.  He also  co-edited Research Handbook on Representative Shareholder Litigation .

Webber is the winner of Boston University School of Law’s 2017 Michael Melton Award for Teaching Excellence, and the dean’s award for service to the law school in 2020 and 2021. He is a graduate of Columbia and NYU Law School, where he was an editor for the law review.

Natasha Hausdorff is a barrister at 6 Pump Court Chambers, and a frequent speaker on International Law. She has a law degree from Oxford University, qualified as a solicitor at Skadden, and subsequently gained an LLM from Tel Aviv University, focussing on public international law and the law of armed conflict. She clerked for Miriam Naor, President of Israel's Supreme Court, and was a Fellow at Columbia Law School's National Security Program. Natasha is legal director of UKLFI Charitable Trust.