Despite having no formal training in Islamic law, Yerushalmi has managed to help influence 24 states to consider laws to restrict judges from consulting Shariah or other foreign and religious laws.

‘Even in Muslim-majority countries, there is a huge debate about what it means to apply Islamic law in the modern world,’ said Andrew F. March, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at Yale University. The deeper flaw in Mr. Yerushalmi’s argument, Mr. March said, is that he characterizes the majority of Muslims who practice some version of Shariah — whether through prayer, charitable giving or other common rituals — as automatic adherents to Islam’s medieval rules of war and political domination.

It is not the first time Mr. Yerushalmi has engaged in polemics. In a 2006 essay, he wrote that ‘most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic,’ and asked why ‘people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem-solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones?’ He has also railed against what he sees as a politically correct culture that avoids open discussion of why ‘the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.’

On its Web site, the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish civil rights organization, describes Mr. Yerushalmi as having a record of ‘anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.’ His legal clients have also drawn notoriety, among them Pamela Geller, an incendiary blogger who helped drive the fight against the Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero.
nytimes.com