Conferences
December 14-15, 2022, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University
Co-sponsored by TAU's Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History and the Max Planck Institutes for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) and for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt).
Markets can no longer be taken for granted. As little as a generation ago, markets were often touted as catch-all solutions for problems as far-ranging as global inequality, poverty, and political stalemate. But in the wake of a major crisis that threatened to bring global financial markets to a halt, an ensuing world-wide recession that threw labor and product markets into chaos, a pandemic that has encouraged a re-imagination of the role of the state in product and service provision, and a growing consensus that inequality is often exacerbated by market dynamics, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to a better understanding of how markets arise, evolve, thrive, or collapse. Markets have become ubiquitous sites for the most crucial and the most day-to-day human interactions, highlighting the urgency of understanding their nature, their potential, and their ethical pitfalls. Armed with the insight that markets are structured by law, legal scholars are central participants in the debates that have arisen.
The tension between conceptual analysis, or theory, and history is age-old. Today, however, the tension seems of particular interest in thinking about markets and market societies in order to evaluate their normative pitfalls and imagine their ethical reform. Economic historians, influenced by the intensification of conceptual rigor within economics, have honed their conceptual tools to advance analytical concepts that travel. They have suggested, for example, that the agency problem or the puzzles of collective action problems (free-riding etc.) can illuminate the development of market institutions across time and space. Meanwhile, historians outside of economic history have concentrated on contingent particularities, seeming to suggest that general conceptual laws are of little use in understanding change over time. Some have claimed that historicizing the development of seemingly general conceptual categories reveals a contingent, political core at the heart of analytical work.
For the most part, however, the possible connections between these styles of work – whether conflictual or cooperative – have been left implicit. This conference aims to generate a discussion that will bring these themes out into the open, asking whether there is a horizon for productive cooperation between legal history or comparative inquiry and conceptual analysis in law. Bringing together theorists of market institutions, in particular private law and corporate law theorists and comparativists as well as legal historians interested in the ethics of the markets, we hope to take a deeper look at the interaction between the development of general legal concepts and their concrete, in-context manifestations.
May 10-11, 2023, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University
Co-sponsored by The Carol and Lawrence Center for Business Ethics Research at Wharton
This is the second workshop on The Normative Foundations of the Market, which this time will (hopefully) take place here at TAU. Markets arise and operate through law—not just through public regulation but also through private law regimes (in property, contract, and tort) that create entitlements, enforce market exchanges, and limit expropriation. The operation of markets also reflects and reinforces a set of social norms—e.g., atomism, competition, douceur, etc.—and these too bear no necessary connection to market activity. Thus, any particular market architecture is not inevitable, but rather the result of a complex set of choices and developments.
The contingent, constructed nature of the legal rules and social norms that guide the market—or, maybe, markets (since different markets may be differently designed)—implies that the legal and social infrastructure of the market should be normatively evaluated. The purpose of these interdisciplinary workshops on The Normative Foundations of the Market is to investigate critically the normative underpinnings that underlie the operation of the market (or of a specific market, such as the labor market or the housing market).
May 4, 2023, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University
Co-sponsored by the Chief Justice Meir Shamgar Center for Digital Law and Innovation
Privacy studies are an emerging cross-disciplinary field of study. The annual workshop on privacy and cyber studies is a platform for presenting and discussing cutting edge studies on privacy. Participants are typically from a broad range of disciplines: computer science, information systems, engineering, law, media studies, psychology and sociology, economics and more. The workshop is based on a call for papers, and submissions are carefully selected.
Please see the invitation in Hebrew and in Arabic.
- Digital Remains
January 18, 2023, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University
Co-sponsored by the Chief Justice Meir Shamgar Center for Digital Law and Innovation
This workshop explored the law and social norms of digital remains. During our digital lives, we constantly create a trail of personal data: emails we exchanged, photos we posted on social media or stored on mobile devices and cloud storage, purchases we made, search inquiries we submitted, “swipe right”, likes and shares, as well as meta-data about our locations, contacts and much more. Once people die, the data becomes digital remains. Social norms about memorialization, access and control are still negotiated; technologies facilitate posthumous management of digital remains but have not gained broad acceptance, and the law is still debating whether to intervene and how, with different approaches undertaken in different jurisdictions.
The workshop facilitated in-depth discussions among scholars who study various aspects of the topic, from legal and media and communications studies. We inquired theoretical approaches (postmortem privacy, quasi-property), and explored empirical work on online memorialization and users’ perspectives.
Academic organizers: Prof. Michael Birnhack (TAU Law) & Dr. Tal Morse (Hadassah College, Jerusalem).
For the invitation, please check here.
For the recordings of the workshop please see Part 1 & Part 2.
- The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation, Dr. Hagai Boas* – Book Launch
November 7, 2022, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University
*Hagai Boas is the former Program Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (2012-17)
This innovative work combines a rigorous academic analysis of the political economy of organ supply for transplantation with autobiographical narratives that illuminate the complex experience of being an organ recipient.
Organs for transplantations come from two sources: living or post-mortem organ donations. These sources set different routes of movement from one body to another. Postmortem organ donations are mainly sourced and allocated by state agencies, while living organ donations are the result of informal relations between donor and recipient. Each route traverses different social institutions, determines discrete interaction between donor and recipient, and is charged with moral meanings that can be competing and contrasting. The political economy of organs for transplants is the gamut of these routes and their interconnections, and this book suggests how such a political economy looks like: what are its features and contours, its negotiation of the roles of the state, market and the family in procuring organs for transplantations, and its ultimate moral justifications. Drawing on Boas’ personal experiences of waiting, searching and obtaining organs, each autobiographical section of the book sheds light on a different aspect of the discussed political economy of organs – post-mortem donations, parental donation, and organ market – and illustrates the experience of living with the fear of rejection and the intimidation of chronic shortage.
- Constitutional Privacy, Prof. Michael Birnhack – Book Launch
March 27, 2023, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law
The Israeli Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty states that “All persons have the right to privacy and to intimacy”. This section was added to the Basic Law in the last minute of the Knesset Committee, and the protocol indicates only: “This is a good proposal”. Privacy enables each of us to create a private space that surrounds us. This is a physical, virtual, intellectual and psychological space. This space is vital for our self-fulfillment, the development of our personality and identity, and is essential so that we are not subject to a constant covert gaze. Private space is needed to that we can nurture healthy relationships, so that we can be part of a community, and that we can all act together, in the roader polity, the state.
This book explores the meaning of constitutional privacy: the relationship between citizen and state, regarding privacy. The book examines the justification of privacy in general and constitutional privacy in particular, discusses privacy’s many challenges, and traces its development in Israeli legislation and case law. The book offers a critical perspective of the “constitutional guidebook” developed in Israeli case law, and shows how it fails to protect privacy.
Bar Ilan Press and Nevo Press, 2023
- Fiduciary Law from a Comparative Perspective, Dr. Yifat Naftal Ben-Zion* - Book Launch
June 25, 2023, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law
*Dr. Yifat Naftali Ben-Zion is a former fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (2019-20)
Fiduciary Law encompasses numerous relationships in private law and offers extensive and distinct remedies for breaches of the obligations it establishes. Despite its significance, the body of legal literature concerning this field in Israel is notably deficient, and court rulings are constrained in their coverage. This book endeavors to bridge this gap and thereby enhance, rejuvenate, and deepen the legal discourse surrounding this area of law. The book examines a wide range of relationships that have been acknowledged as creating fiduciary relationships, including those between doctors and patients, parents and children, officers and a company, and lawyers and their clients. Through extensive and unconventional comparative research, Dr. Naftali Ben Zion presents an innovative theory that explains the disparities in court rulings across various common law jurisdictions (UK, Australia, Canada, the United States and Israel). This theory enables a comprehensive analysis of existing laws and offers resolutions to unsettled disputes concerning the boundaries of fiduciary duty, thereby contributing to the advancement of theoretical literature in general, and Israeli law in particular, within this crucial domain.
For the invitation (in Hebrew), please check here.
June 21-22, 2023, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University
The planned Gala event will celebrate six years of the Center’s activities under the theme of "Markets, Ethics and Law". The conference will bring together many of the Center’s past and present fellows to discuss a selected set of their works in progress exploring the kinds of questions we have all been thinking about in our individual scholarship and collective deliberation throughout these years. Presentations will discuss topics such as the limits of the market, the social responsibility of market actors, the distributive effects of markets, and the normative implications of their globalization. We are very much looking forward to this Gala event, not only as a culmination of a six-year long concentrated effort, but also as a milestone that will vividly demonstrate the intellectual power and promising potential of a multi-disciplinary community of scholars dedicated to the study of the ethics of the market, in line with the vision of the Center for the past six years.
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