The article discusses whether, and to what extent, Israeli case-law in the fields of property law and planning law is influenced by economic-efficiency considerations. The article critically examines three major areas of property law: compensation for injury to lands' development rights, remedies for unlawful building on another's property, and conflicting transactions in land. All three examples illustrate that assessing the impact of economic theory is somewhat complex. On the one hand, judges are increasingly cognizant of the economic approach to law, and some of them tend to include economic-oriented considerations in their reasoning. Judges opposed to efficiency analysis often mention this theory, even if pejoratively, in their rulings. Economic factors cannot and are not ignored. On the other hand, the judges' implementation of the economic calculus is often simplistic or even flawed. Moreover, there sometimes exists an inverse correlation between the identity of the judges most sympathetic to economic reasoning and the identity of the judges who have adopted the most efficient rule.

This Article discusses the normative basis for the protection of human rights in Israel and discusses various effects of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty enacted in 1992. The Article points out that this “constitutional revolution” affected not only the judiciary, which enforces the protection of human rights, but both the executive and the legislative branches that have also internalized the constitutional revolution, by carefully evaluating every bill proposed and every other government action to ensure that it passes constitutional muster. Additionally, the Article discusses the effect of the constitutional revolution on public discourse in Israel. A central part of the discussion is devoted to the role of the protection of human rights in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, and to the role of the protection of human rights during periods of terror activities.

This paper examines the politics of defending human rights, based on Public Choice Theory. Human rights organizations in Israel turn to the court to defend human rights. We argue that this strategy may prove ineffective in terms of defending human rights for the long run for various reasons. First, the politics of defending human rights is very complex where the power circle beside the court and human rights organizations includes also the relations between politicians, bureaucrats and the public. Second, the political culture that has been established in Israeli society since the 1980s is such that relations between citizens and politicians are based on a bottom-up orientation. Thus, norms and social changes can be hardly imposed from top down, but mainly evolve from bottom up. Directing all human rights strategies toward an elitist institution such as the Supreme Court may bear results in the short run but in the long run attitude change as well as policy decisions towards defending human rights are likely to emerge due to demands from society. Third, by empowering the court, human rights organizations disconnect these issues from the vast majority of Israeli citizens discouraging belief change. The paper concludes that defending human rights must include also attempts of mass mobilization which will create the grounds for human rights organizations to turn to the legislative authorities.

Crime seriousness research indicates that respondents from varying social and cultural groups rank the perceived seriousness of offenses similarly, with violent offenses as the most serious, followed by property, economic, and victimless offenses. It has also consistently been found, however, that the specific ratings of offenses by respondents from different social groups often differ. Because Israel is considered a deeply divided society, this article focuses on the comparison of public perceptions of the seriousness of varied criminal offenses between respondents belonging to varying central social groups in the countiy. As expected, the findings show similar, albeit not identical, rankings of offenses and important differences in the rating of specific offenses across groups. These findings are interpreted in the context of the Israeli society.

This Article explores the specificity of constitutional interpretation. It cannot be found in its object, but in the quality of the interpreters, the augmentative techniques it applies, and the standards it produces. The interpreters are not only courts, but also non-judicial authorities such as the Executive or the Parliament. Constitutional interpretation by these authorities tends to be exercised collectively. Although the methods that may be used for constitutional interpretation are the same as those used for statutory interpretation, one notices that there is more frequent use of certain types of arguments. But the most important distinctive character of constitutional interpretation lies in the nature of what it produces. Its output is the constitution. This is true first because by deciding what the meaning of the constitutional text is, the interpreter decides on the substance of the constitutional norm. But the interpreter also decides that a particular text, which until the moment of the decision had no legal value or had the value of a statute, has the meaning of a constitutional norm. At the same time he decides that by being a constitutional norm it prevails over other norms and decides what this supremacy entails. It can therefore be said that constitutional interpretation constitutes the Constitution.

The Knesset recently authorized privatized prisons in Israel. The rationale is primarily economic, based on claims of savings as high as 25%. However various studies contradict each other with regard both to cutting costs and to the efficacy of privatization. Not all agree that quality of life, daily functioning, and the quality of educational and rehabilitative activities are better in privatized than public prisons. The Ministries of Finance and Internal Security decided on privatization for financial reasons without holding a meaningful public debate on the social, value-based and moral aspects. One such question is whether it is appropriate for the state to transfer coercive power over prisoners lacking autonomy to private parties motivated by economic interests who could possibly exploit their power to profit at the expense of the prisoners' living conditions, treatment, training and rehabilitation upon return to the community. The notion of justice will likely suffer when subordinated to private profit motives. The Privatization of Prisons Law in Israel partially discusses these problems by means of various clauses that restrict the possibility of harming prisoners rights and require care, education and rehabilitative activities, in addition to requiring strict supervision over activities in privatized prisons. However, in Israel, public supervision of privatized entities is inadequate. The rigor of the law is seldom invoked with private parties who violate laws or the terms of contracts they themselves have signed. Hence, the effectiveness of supervision is also somewhat suspect. The disadvantages of privatization render its merits questionable when compared with Israel's current public prisons system. Despite extreme overcrowding and substandard facilities in some Israeli prisons, these function reasonably well. There is relatively little violence, and prisoners enjoy care, education, and vocational training. We may conclude that it is preferable to improve facilities in public prisons, expanding them and strengthening their rehabilitative orientation. This can be done by partially privatizing the care, education and rehabilitation components as well as the services and maintenance, while leaving the security and administration in the hands of the Prison Service.

Modern equality as derived from the Enlightenment has always had problems with difference. Whereas feudalism set inequality as the baseline, modern society sets equality as the baseline, but allows for unequal treatment based on differences. Thus, differences among the sexes have been invoked to treat women as inferiors and racial differences to deprive racial minorities of equal treatment. Liberalism has countered these moves by promoting a conception of equality as identity according to which race or gender-based differences are irrelevant for purposes of political participation or employment. More recent claims for equality based on identity politics which call for a type of equality that accounts for differences pose vexing problems for liberalism. How should liberalism handle this? By creating exceptions to generally applicable laws? By promoting group-based autonomy and self-government at the risk ofbalkanizing the polity? Or, on the contrary, by rejecting demands for recognition of differences and reinforcing equality as identity? After analyzing the dialectic of equality, this Article argues that, based on commitment to the premise that all human beings share an equal status for possessing the same capacity for moral choice, pluralism offers a better framework than liberalism for the best possible reconciliation of identity and difference. This implies a departure from the monolithic nation-state toward multi-layered interconnected centers of collective autonomy and self-government.

An army attacks a neighborhood where the enemy is hiding among civilians. To what extent is the army required to expose its combatants to life-threatening risks in order to spare enemy civilians? This Article seeks to interpret the pertinent standards and rules of international law from the perspective of the principle of human dignity. The human dignity principle informs the interpretation of the law on the conduct of hostilities and provides a built-in mechanism for improving armies' treatment of enemy civilians. It inspires additional remedial and institutional norms that could overcome armies' distrust of each other during the height of battle. The principle of human dignity recognizes a general duty to strive to reduce harm to enemy civilians as well as specific rules against using them as human shields, hostages, or objects for retaliation. This Article concludes that in general there is no requirement to risk combatants to reduce the risk to enemy civilians, although a number of the specific rules do entail the assumption of such risks.

This study examines outcomes from the first prison-based therapeutic community, for drug addicted offenders, implemented at the Sharon prison during 1994–1997. The article describes the program that took place and the process of treatment experienced by those who participated in the program. Using a Cox Proportional Hazard Regression Model (CPHRM) to calculate Hazard of Recidivism, a sample of 421 offenders who participated in the program was analyzed to evaluate program outcomes, while indicating factors that increase/decrease hazard of recidivism. Our findings from the CPHRM revealed that length of time in the program is one of the strongest predictors of hazard of recidivism. However, different from other studies which argue that “the more the better,” findings from this study question such an assumption. Additionally, findings from the above multivariate analysis suggest that criminal history (i.e. age on set, and number of prior arrests), significantly increase hazards of recidivism. Results of the study are discussed in regard to the increase in prison population, expected benefits of treating incarcerated offenders, and the legal aspects of prisoners' rights.

The German Constitution guarantees freedom of scientific research. This guarantee raises questions, such as its legal definition and scope, as well as possible conflicts with other constitutional rights. This Article suggests that in order to have normative legal consequences, the constitutional concept of science must have an ethical dimension—the importance of the value of research and research for nonbiased “truth.” Such an ethically-loaded definition of science gives rise to internal restrictions, by placing forgery, manipulation, plagiarism and other forms of improper scientific practice outside the scope of constitutional protection. Restrictions to constitutional protection can also be derived from other constitutional rights, such as the right to privacy, environmental protection, and the life and health of others. Another arguably important restriction is derived from the right to human dignity, particularly as it touches upon biomedical questions of human cloning and embryo research. This paper argues that the Kantian proscription of treating human beings as a means to an end, which lies at the heart of the right to human dignity, imposes significant restrictions on current trends in biomedicine. These restrictions warn against an implicit utilitarianism that devalues the rights of vulnerable human beings.

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 challenges the premise that the separation of state and religion is a necessary predicate for religious free exercise. The state's duty to treat people as equals requires it to ensure that all citizens enjoy reasonable access to religious services. Public supply of religious services thus enhances the exercise of freedom of religion. The extent of public involvement in the provision of a religious service is not by itself a sufficient justification for the regulation of the relevant activity. In certain cases, the intervention is justified by reasons that are unrelated to the scope of government involvement. A prominent example is the case of competition between different religious congregations over limited resources, such as space and time at a holy site. Regulation of activity is then required in order to ensure reasonable access. In other cases, the government enhances the powers of religious bodies, and thus generates a concern of religious coercion. In these cases the governmental role may well result in an infringement of religious freedom. However, such a conclusion is not self-evident, and a detailed assessment of the over all effect of the government involvement is required in order to determine whether the involvement—and what type of involvement—is desirable.

These and related arguments are demonstrated through a discussion of the Israeli experience of almost six decades of intensive involvement of a democratic state in supplying religious services. The Israeli case can serve as a thought-provoking hypothetical on the consequences—and thus of the desirability—of adopting a model of extensive establishment of religion(s) by a democratic state.