Jewish law has long faced the problem of individual litigants seeking multiple answers
to a single halakhic question in order to select what they found to be the most favorable
ruling. In this article, I examine the role that forum shopping for legal opinions played in the
Jewish community of the medieval Islamic world. Individuals often made recourse to multiple
juristic authorities, whether those authorities were leaders serving the geonic academies of
Babylonia and the land of Israel or local jurists. I discuss some of the strategies the geonim
and local jurists used to reduce competition between judicial rulings and how local judges
utilized the various responsa composed on their behalf by these authorities or presented to
them by litigants to bolster their case before the Jewish court. In so doing, I aim to refine our
understanding of the social and legal role of rabbinic responsa in the medieval Islamic world
by suggesting that this literature served as expert testimony to support one side or the other in
a particular case rather than as the definitive record of the court’s ruling in that case.

EB00000002440K

Available

• One Question, Two Answers: Rabbinic Responsa as Legal Advocacy in the Medieval Islamic World