Yale University alumni, faculty and students launched a petition on Tuesday demanding the University immediately divest from corporations that conduct business in Israel.

In doing so, the Yale Divest from Israel Campaign (YDIC) joins the ranks of 50 other university groups, including ones at Harvard and Princeton, that have formed a grass-roots divestment movement.

The petition is unique in that it provides a legal argument for divestment in addition to a moral one, arguing that by investing in Israel, the university violates its own strict ethical investment policy.

The policy is grounded in guidelines dictated by Yale law professor John G. Simon’s 1972 book The Ethical Investor. When investments lead to social harm—especially when they violate human rights laws concerning the deprivation of health, safety and freedom—the policy mandates that Yale divest.

YDIC’s petition also calls for Yale to make public any private investments it has in Israel.

YDIC alumni spokesperson Rod Swenson, who graduated from Yale’s School of Architecture in 1969, said the group will pursue legal action if the administration ignores the petition.

“If Yale does not respond to the petition within a few months, we will take legal action—and unless the university divests or rescinds its investment policies, it will be subject to misdemeanors and could lose its tax-exempt status,” Swenson said.

In comparison to other divestment efforts such as Harvard’s, which simply calls for divestment on moral grounds, Yale’s petition drives a hard bargain, according to Francis Boyle, who is a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and served as a technical adviser for the Yale petition.

Boyle is also credited with beginning the divestment movement in November 2000 with a speech he made at Illinois State University that suggested divestment could help the Mideast situation, as it did with the South African apartheid in the 1980s.

“I think Yale’s petition is much better than Harvard’s or Columbia’s petition in that it possesses both a legal and moral argument and calls for the total, rather than the partial selling off of investments,” Boyle said.

But he added that Yale’s petition asks for so much that he wonders whether it will garner much support.

The petition is posted on YDIC’s website and was first publicized in an advertisement that appeared in Tuesday’s issue of the Yale Daily News.

Yale University President Richard Levin could not be reached for comment yesterday. But he told the Daily News on Tuesday that he had not heard of the petition.

Administrative response may not be immediately forthcoming. According to Yale University spokesperson Tom Conroy, all divestment proposals must be heard by Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) before they can be initiated.

“Anyone can request divestment, but the ACIR fields all requests and they make the official recommendations regarding the university’s holdings,” he said.