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Hansell's 1978 Legal Opinion
(CAMERA) Ricki Hollander - The 1978 legal opinion of Herbert J. Hansell, the State Department's legal advisor, was reversed by President Reagan less than three years later. Hansell's opinion was based, at least in part, on an arguably faulty interpretation of an earlier "finding" by Julius Stone. To support his opinion on settlements, Hansell cited Stone's 1959 analysis, Legal Controls of International Conflict. Yet the same Professor Stone - considered one of the premier legal theorists - subsequently wrote a book, Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations, that dealt with the specific legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In it, he maintained that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal was a "subversion...of basic international law principles."