For many years, institutional psychiatry was a major tool in the suppression of political dissent. Moreover, it appears painfully clear that, while the worst excesses of the past have mostly disappeared, the problem is not limited to the pages of history. What is more, the revelations of the worst of these abuses (and the concomitant rectification of many of them) may, paradoxically, have created the false illusion that all the major problems attendant to questions of institutional treatment and conditions in these nations have been solved. This is decidedly not so.

Remarkably, the issue of the human rights of persons with mental disabilities had been ignored for decades by the international agencies vested with the protection of human rights on a global scale. Within the legal literature, it appears that the first time disability rights were conceptualized as a human rights issue was as recently as 1993 when, in a groundbreaking article, Eric Rosenthal and Leonard Rubenstein first applied international human rights principles to the institutionalization of people with mental disabilities.

For people with mental disabilities, in particular, the development of human rights protections may be even more significant than for people with other disabilities. Like people with other disabilities, people with mental disabilities face degradation, stigmatization, and discrimination throughout the world today. But unlike people with other disabilities, many people with mental disabilities are routinely confined, against their will, in institutions, and deprived of their freedom, dignity, and basic human rights. People with mental disabilities who are fortunate enough to live outside of institutions often remain imprisoned by the social isolation they experience, often from their own families. They are not included in educational programs, and they face attitudinal barriers to employment because they have not received the education and training needed to obtain employment or because of discrimination based on unsubstantiated fears and prejudice. Only recently have disability discrimination laws and policies in the United States and elsewhere focused on changing such attitudes and promoting the integration of people with disabilities into our schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces.

The question remains, however: to what extent has institutional, state-sponsored psychiatry been used as a tool of political suppression, and what are the implications of this pattern and practice? After an Introductory section (Part I), I discuss, in Part II, the first revelations of the dehumanization inflicted on persons with mental disabilities, primarily (but not exclusively) in Soviet Bloc nations. In Part III, I discuss developments after these revelations were publicized. In Part IV, I weigh the extent to which the post-revelation reforms have been effective and meaningful. In Part V, I explain the meanings of sanism and pretextuality, and discuss how they relate to the topic at hand. Then, in Part VI, I raise questions that have not yet been answered, and that, I believe, should help set the research agendas of those thinking about these important issues.

This Article shows that Israeli case law refrains from economic analysis of harm to competition when it comes to determining whether agreements are antitrust violations. It also shows that the antitrust agency seems, de facto, to be content with the fact that courts tend not to conduct economic analysis in antitrust cases. Moreover, it shows that many times the antitrust agency itself initiated interpretations of the statute that set a broad range of per se prohibitions that do not require economic analysis. I hypothesize that the reason that the antitrust agency is content with the lack of economics analysis stems from the fact that broad per se prohibitions assist the agency in its role as a major litigator of antitrust cases. They also cause many of the business transactions to be subject to ex ante review by the antitrust agency, thereby enhancing the agency's regulatory powers. After fifteen years of broad per se prohibitions, courts concerned with the opportunism of parties began interpreting the statute to enable per se legality in many cases. It was only then that the antitrust authority responded by helping to propose an amendment that would make the statute less vague.

The purpose of this Article is to critically analyze and examine positive Israeli copyright law under the paradigm of law and economics. The Article reviews several central and influential decisions of Israeli Supreme Court in the area of copyright law. It then analyzes these decisions in a manner that critically evaluates the reflections and impacts of the law and economics school on positive Israeli copyright law. Within this framework, the Article focuses on a selected number of cases and topics, including the Israeli Supreme Court's interpretation and application of the originality requirement and the fair use exemption. As the discussion in the Article indicates, several important decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court have indeed applied, either explicitly or implicitly, utilitarian considerations while implementing economic analysis as a focal of Israeli copyright law. One interesting observation that arises from our survey is that at least in some cases, there is no correlation between a declaratory judicial implementation of economic considerations and the desirability of the court's decision in terms of its efficiency. In several cases, while the Supreme Court applied economic considerations as its proclaimed normative compass, the outcomes of the court's decisions seem inefficient; whereas in other cases in which courts applied non-economic theories as their corner stone (while neglecting emphasis on economic considerations) the results were found to be economically efficient.

What is corporate bankruptcy law's unique function in the economy? Law and economics scholars reject using it to achieve purely redistributive purposes but this is where their agreement ends. Thus, two questions serve as focal points for debate: First, should the decision on how to redeploy in the economy the assets of the financially distressed firm be mandatory or enabling? Second, which decision-making mechanism should be employed by lawmakers? “First order” theories (arguing for and against a mandatory bankruptcy regime), or “second order” theories (arguing for and against different methods of mandatory decision-making) ensued as a result. Unfortunately, “third order” attempts to supply a convincing answer to the economic question—combining as part of the answer the many redistributive impulses displayed in any corporate bankruptcy setting—were few and scarce. Moreover, scholars have been arguing with each other without fully exhausting the discussion of the gap dividing them. An ex-ante point of view, highlighting the perspective of the debtor-firm's relations with its consensual investors, was offered to lawmakers contemplating social wealth maximization, as a replacement to the conventional ex-post point of view, which emphasizes a more general societal perspective. The distinction between the two paradigms did not go unnoticed by scholars, but unexplainably, it failed to become the center of debate.