Conferences

 

Conferences 2021-22

 

• The Normative Foundations of the Market–  Postponed Conference

April 22-24, 2022, The Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania

Co-sponsored by The Carol and Lawrence Center for Business Ethics Research at    Wharton

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 this interdisciplinary workshop 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).

 

 

• The Ninth Privacy, Cyber and Technology Workshop

May 10, 2022, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law

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.

For the invitation (in Hebrew) please check here

 

 

• Dr. Mickey Zar* - Politics of Privacy - Book Launch

May 10, 2022, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law

 

Privacy is political. Emphasizing its political nature, this book examines privacy as an essential human experience, as a social concept and as a legal right. In arguing for a political conception of privacy, the book shifts the grounds of discourse away from the individual’s psychological and intellectual needs, and towards the question of how the individual can find her place, or make room for herself, in society.

The information sphere, including the internet, is a political arena in which struggles over access, control, freedom, and privacy reach their clearest articulation. The book describes and analyzes the social and political conflicts that characterize the contemporary information sphere, conceptualizing them as a technological drama. The major forces in today’s ongoing power struggles are those supporting a prevailing culture of surveillance, pitted against those who pose resistance to surveillance and the practices that facilitate its entrenchment.

The drama unfolds in three acts. In the first act, influential political players promote compliance with the social norms that enable and support surveillance practices, thus delaying or preventing resistance. At the same time, significant oppositional players attempt to hamper the establishment of a surveillance society. These actors operate mostly within existing institutional frameworks while employing “the rules of the game” - through legislation, NGO’s or technology regulation. However, In the next two acts of the drama, less institutionalized players appear on the technological stage. Alongside “negative” tactics such as refusal to submit to biometric identification in the workplace, breaking CCTV cameras, or wearing masks that prevent facial recognition, these actors also employ affirmative strategies such as creating technological systems that enable anonymous online activity, or leaking classified information about governmental and corporate surveillance practices. Underscoring a political articulation of the protection of privacy provides the underpinning for the argument that the resistance to surveillance should be recognized as political, and thus potentially as civil disobedience, rather than as a criminal act.

In direct contrast to familiar claims that privacy serves the individual’s selfish interest in isolation, and against the rhetoric of “nothing to hide” that supports such claims, this book argues that privacy is an essential precondition for vibrant and thriving democracy. Protection of privacy is crucial for the individual’s self-definition, especially so for the individual’s political identity. Privacy protects the human potential for individual freedom of action, and its loss threatens the viability of acting politically.

*Dr. Michey Zar is a former fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (2018-19).

 

 

• Prof. Ariel Porat and Prof. Omri Ben Shahar, Personalized Law, Different Rules for Different People – Book Launch

November 7, 2021, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law

 

We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. “Personalized Law”—-rules that vary person by person—-will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. “Reasonable person” standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own “reasonable you” rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting.

Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. In this book, Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat not only present this concept in a clear, easily accessible way, but they offer specific examples of how personalized law may be implemented across a variety of real-life applications.

 

 

 

•  The Great Transformation, The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time -  Book Event

November 24, 2021, Tel Aviv University, The Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies

 

Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, and even economists ‎consider Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which first appeared in 1944, to be ‎one of the most important studies ever written about the origins of the modern economy.  ‎Turning common presumptions on their head, Polanyi complicates the whole history of ‎material and moral progress associated with the rise of liberalism since the end of the ‎eighteenth century.  The narrative subsequently ranges from the early days of agrarian ‎reform and free trade in Britain up through the Great Depression and fascism’s ‎destruction of European democracy.  ‎‎ ‎

The work has now been translated for the first time into Hebrew, a response to the ‎ongoing crises of world capitalism and the ensuing threat they pose to liberal democracy ‎everywhere.  The initiative was undertaken by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the ‎manuscript was edited by Professor Michael Zakim, who is Professor of ‎History at Tel Aviv University and affiliated faculty at the Safra Center.  The Safra Center, together with the ‎Van Leer Institute and the School of History at Tel Aviv University, will be sponsoring a book launch this November marking the appearance of the Hebrew edition of The Great ‎Transformation.  The occasion will bring together scholars from a variety of fields – the ‎law, the social sciences, literature, and history – to discuss the importance of Polanyi’s ‎book in a multi-disciplinary spirit reflecting Polanyi’s own commitment to the humanist ‎tradition. ‎

 

• Automation and the Impacts of a Transforming Labor Market – Postponed Conference

TBD, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law

 

Automation and digitalization are widely viewed as sources of transformation and potential upheaval in labor markets worldwide. In particular, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, including machine learning, virtual agents and autonomous robotics, are leading experts to project major economic shifts, though the nature of the shifts is very much contested. In part due to lack of data, in other parts to due to uncertainty about the speed and breadth of the expected change, questions abound about the economic, social and political ramifications of digitalization.

With respect to the economic transformations, questions pertain primarily to the nature of change the labor market will experience. To what extent will automation directly displace labor in certain jobs, create new job opportunities, or reorient the type of tasks and functions the jobs entail? On the political front, if disruption to traditional jobs becomes widespread, how will heightened job insecurity affect mass preferences on issues such as government intervention and labor market regulation, social protection or even immigration policy? Will a sharp transformation in the labor market decrease popular trust in the political system and bolster authoritarian and populist parties?

The workshop will bring together of a group of scholars and practitioners that have worked on or thought about issues related to the labor market impacts of automation and their economic, social and political repercussions. The chief aim is to help develop our understanding of these interconnected issues that arise from automation by engaging people with different professional backgrounds and expertise relevant for studying this topic.

 

 

 

• Prof. Martijn Hesselink, Justifying Contract in Europe – Book Launch

March 10. 2022, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law

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This book explores the normative foundations of European contract law. It addresses fundamental political questions on contract law in Europe from the perspective of leading contemporary political theories. Does the law of contract need a democratic basis? To what extent should it be Europeanized? What justifies the binding force of contract and the main remedies for breach? When should weaker parties be protected?

Should market transactions be considered legally void when they are immoral? Which rules of contract law should the parties be free to opt out of? Adopting a critical lens, the book interrogates utilitarian, liberal-egalitarian, libertarian, communitarian, civic republican, and discourse-theoretical political philosophies and analyses the answers they provide to these questions. It also situates these theoretical debates within the context of the political landscape of European contract law and the divergent views expressed by law makers, legal academics, and other stakeholders. The book moves beyond the acquis positivism, market reductionism, and private law essentialism that tend to dominate these conversations and foregrounds normative complexity. It explores the principles and values behind various arguments used in the debates on European contract law and its future to highlight the normative stakes involved in the practical question of what we, as a society, should do about contract law in Europe. In so doing, it opens up democratic space for the consideration of alternative futures for contract law in the European Union, and for better justifications for those parts of the EU contract law acquis we wish to retain.