Conferences
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The Market as a Legal Construct – 20-21 September 2019, Yale University, co-sponsored with the Yale Law School Center for Private Law
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. Appreciating the significance of law as the infrastructure of markets reveals that market structures and many of the challenges that they pose—runaway inequality, the erosion of corporate accountability, and the commodification of politics—result from a complex set of choices and developments, including foundational choices that can remain disguised, far below the consequences that they produce. We will pursue questions such as, what models of the legal subject, the legal entitlement, inter-subjective legal relations, and legal authority are immanent in market orders, and what conception of law itself do these models invite? Papers from this conference are slated for publication in a special edition of Law and Contemporary Problems, with Daniel Markovits (Yale Law School) and Hanoch Dagan as guest editors
Friday, September 20
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8:30 – 9:15 |
Breakfast and coffee |
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9:15 – 10:15 |
Commentator: Douglas Kysar |
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10:30 – 11:30 |
Joseph Blocher: King Leopold's Bonds and the Odious Debts Mystery Commentator: Jonathan Macey |
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11:45 – 12:45 |
Richard Brooks: Law and the Transaction Structure Commentator: Carol Rose |
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12:45 – 2:15 |
Lunch |
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2:15 – 3:15 |
Katharina Pistor: Coding Data: New Frontiers in the Legal and Digital Organization of Markets Commentator: Amy Kapczynski |
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3:30 – 4:30 |
Avihay Dorfman: The Legality of Discrimination in the Market Commentator: Alvin Klevorick |
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6:30 – 9:30 |
Dinner |
Saturday, September 21
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8:30 – 9:00 |
Breakfast and coffee |
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9:00 – 10:00 |
Christine Desan: Money and Economic Theories of Value Commentator: David Grewal |
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10:15 – 11:15 |
Robert Scott: The Paradox of Contracting in Markets Commentator: Alan Schwartz |
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11:30 – 12:30 |
Przemysław Pałka: Algorithmic Central Planning: Between Efficiency and Freedom Commentator: Aditi Bagchi |
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12:30 – 2:00 |
Lunch |
For more information and the draft papers please check the website
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This year’s annual conference on “A New Information Age,” was held on May 16-17, 2019.
Information technology excites the imagination. Amidst near consensus that we live in an age where data technology is a game-changer, views are deeply polarized about the direction of change. Some hope new modes of generating and handling information will be keys to decentralizing power, expanding democratization, and generating an inclusive public sphere with limitless mobility. Others warn that current developments lean toward new frontiers of domination and centralized power, the eclipse of all privacy, and the snuffing out of meaningful avenues for personal autonomy and choice. Where some see the beginnings of utopia, others are convinced that the horizons for political agency are fast closing off, and that the end of individual freedom – even as an ideal – is around the corner. We take the polarization of discourse as meaningful in itself, a symptom of a lack of accepted analytical foundations to understand and evaluate the changes our societies are going through and the challenges those changes present. The conference will gather a group of thinkers to imagine analytic frameworks that would help us understand these developments. The inquiry is far-reaching and open-ended. It may alter not simply the way we view the relationship between technology and information, but also our most basic sense of the nature and value of individuality, of choice, of markets, of communal interaction, and of politics.
January 20, 2019, The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co-sponsored with The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of Law at Tel-Aviv University.
The Israeli Law and Society Association Annual Conference is a forum for all research on the interaction between law and society. This year’s conference provided a particular focus on the links between markets, law, and inequality. Some of the central questions the conference raised included, how do law and the market create inequality, and how do they deal with it once it exists? What role does the law play in justifying inequality? When and how does law mitigate inequality? Finally, what is the potential of the nexus of law and markets to correct or oppose inequality? The conference explored different dimensions of inequality: class, identity (race, gender, nationality, sexuality), and community. The conference included twenty-one panels and approximately a hundred speakers, among them Professor Joseph Weiler (NYU), Professor Menachem Mautner (TAU), Israeli Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Amit, and Professor Michael Karayanni (Dean, Hebrew University Faculty of Law). Two current Safra Fellows and one former Fellow presented their work in the panel on Algorithms & Inequality:
Chair: Prof. Yishai Blank, Tel Aviv University
Dr. Tomer Shadmy, “Algorithmic Regulation and the Need to Reimagine the Rule of Law”
Dr. Fabrizio Esposito, “Inefficient Predictive Personalization and the Collaboration between Law and Economics”
Dr. Mateusz Grochowski, “Algorithmic Pricing – New Frontiers of Fairness in Contract Law?”
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The Politics of Justice in European Private Law, Social Justice, Access Justice, Societal Justice - Book Launch
December 19, 2018, The Buchmann Faculty of Law
The ‘Politics of Justice in Private Law’ intends to highlight the differences between the Member States’ concepts of social justice, which have developed historically, and the distinct European concept of access justice. Contrary to the emerging critique of Europe’s justice deficit in the aftermath of the Euro crisis, I argue that beneath the larger picture of the Monetary Union, a more positive and more promising European concept of justice is developing. European access justice is thinner than national social justice, but access justice represents a distinct conception of justice nevertheless. It is both descriptive and normative. I will neither defend national cultures and traditions nor proclaim European access justice as a substitute for national social justice. Member States/nation states remain free to complement European access justice and bring to bear their own pattern of social justice. However, the ongoing economic and societal transformations force us in light of “intuitively felt cracks” to rethink national patterns of social justice and their compatibility with the European concept of justice. The book defends the European experiment as good and useful. The European legal order and European society yield genuine social values. Nostalgia for the national welfare state of the 1970s or the sovereign nation state is not likely to be an adequate answer to the societal and economic transformations at the beginning of the 21st century.
January 3-5, 2019, Dan Carmel Hotel, Haifa
Co- sponsored with The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of Law at Tel-Aviv University, the University of Haifa Law School, and The Center for Jewish Democratic Law, Bar Ilan University.
June 19-10, 2019, The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co–sponsored by the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, The Minerva Center for Human Rights, and The David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History.
The Private Law Junior Scholars Conference is a collaboration between the law faculties of the University of Toronto and Tel Aviv University. It aims to create a forum for junior researchers from around the world to exchange ideas about private law and different aspects of private law scholarship. The conference provides a select number of doctoral candidates, post-doctoral researchers and junior faculty (pre-tenure) with a unique opportunity to present their work and receive meaningful feedback from senior faculty members and peers.
This Year’s Topic was Autonomy in Private Law: Past, Present, Future. Autonomy has long stood as the central pillar of conventional scholarship in private law. Much of private law, as depicted in these accounts, is built around the ideal-typical vision of autonomous agents as the relevant legal subjects, and frequently, private law is also claimed to realize and enhance autonomy. The assumption of the existence and desirability of autonomous agents and agency appears to be shared by widely diverging approaches to private law.
Private law’s autonomy-paradigm is, however, increasingly challenged by alternative theoretical accounts of the field that identify freedom as private law’s central pillar, or those that emphasize the relational dimension of private law. Additional challenges emanate from societal and technological developments that create new areas of power imbalances. At the same time, precisely because of its perceived emphasis on autonomy, private law might seem to offer a promising normative framework for addressing some pressing societal problems.
These challenges and promises invite further reflection about the place of autonomy in private law’s past, present and future. The 2019 Private Law Junior Scholars’ Conference explored these issues, shed light on resulting tensions, and developed possible future perspectives.
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The Mystery of the Kibbutz – Book Event
5 June, 2019, The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co-Sponsored by The David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History.
The kibbutz is a social experiment in collective living that challenges traditional economic theory. By sharing all income and resources equally among its members, the kibbutz system created strong incentives to free ride or—as in the case of the most educated and skilled—to depart for the city. Yet for much of the twentieth century kibbutzim thrived, and kibbutz life was perceived as idyllic both by members and the outside world. In The Mystery of the Kibbutz, Ran Abramitzky (Economics, Stanford University) blends economic perspectives with personal insights to examine how kibbutzim successfully maintained equal sharing for so long despite their inherent incentive problems.
Weaving the story of his own family’s experiences as kibbutz members with extensive economic and historical data, Abramitzky sheds light on the idealism and historic circumstances that helped kibbutzim overcome their economic contradictions. He illuminates how the design of kibbutzim met the challenges of thriving as enclaves in a capitalist world and evaluates kibbutzim’s success at sustaining economic equality. By drawing on the stories of his pioneering grandmother who founded a kibbutz, his uncle who remained in a kibbutz his entire adult life, and his mother who was raised in and left the kibbutz, Abramitzky brings to life the rise and fall of the kibbutz movement.
June 4-5, 2019, The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co–sponsored by the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, The Minerva Center for Human Rights, and The David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History.
Over the past decade, the values of liberalism have been subjected to intensifying challenges in politics, culture, and science. The challenges to liberalism are a global phenomenon, with specific manifestations in Israeli society. This conference was a retrospective on the work of Professor Menachem Mautner, whose writings on multi-culturalism and the liberalism of flourishing have made waves world-wide, on the occasion of his retirement from the law faculty at Tel Aviv. Mautner has been a leading voice in articulating the challenges to liberalism that come not only from non-liberal cultural groups, but from markets – typically thought of as a bastion of liberalism. His response to the challenge is a reformulation of liberalism itself, suggesting a liberalism that can accommodate cultural critique. Participants at the conference contributed original essays dealing with some of the problematics that Mautner developed throughout the course of his career. In particular, many focused on one of Mautner’s enduring contributions: the shift in Israeli jurisprudence from argumentation based on formalistic reasoning to argumentation that grapples with value judgments head on. The original essays presented at the conference will be collected in a volume to be published in 2020.
Workshops
November 11, 2018, The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co-sponsored with ERC, Tel Aviv University, the Elga Cegla Clinical Law Program, and the Workers’ Rights Clinic
The power imbalance between the employer and employee and, in particular, the weaker bargaining position of the employee in relation to the employer are among the basic assumptions of labor law. This premise requires closer examination in relation to the employment of in-home care workers by dependent elderly. Experience in the field has demonstrated the existence of a real need for information and assistance to the patient-employers and their families. This understanding led to the foundation of a workers’ and patients’ rights hotline, which is operated by the Workers’ Rights Clinic. The seminar presented initial findings raised from inquiries to the hotline, followed by a roundtable discussion of various perspectives on the issue and the challenges facing long-term care patients.
December 27, 2018, The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co-sponsored with ERC, Tel Aviv University
In July 2005, a Government Decision was adopted which obligated the Israeli Government to act to conclude Bilateral Agreements with the countries of origin of temporary migrant workers in Israel. After a slow start and prodded by a High Court decision, the State gradually began to sign bilateral agreements to regulate temporary labor migration. There are presently agreements in the three main sectors in which migrant workers are permitted to enter Israel: agriculture, construction, and care. This reflects a paradigm shift in the political world and in the State’s approach to temporary labor migration generally and, in particular, with respect to bilateral agreements. The symposium examined the “day after” the signature of the bilateral agreements and the implications of the new situation on the rights of migrant workers, on immigration patterns in Israel, and on the sectors in which the agreements apply.
April 11, 2019,The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co- Sponsored by the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center
For the Program in Hebrew, click here
"Data is the new oil" but unlike oil, which is a Non-renewable resource, the amount of data that is collected about each and every one of us is increasing in every passing day. Based on that some argue that the right to privacy is no longer relevant. Others argued that in those circumstances, privacy, as a legal right and a social norm, is more important than ever. Privacy studies are an emerging cross-disciplinary field of study as reflected in the various fields of research represented in the sixth Annual Privacy and Cyber Workshop.
February 29, 2019, , The Buchmann Faculty of Law
Co- sponsored by TraffLab Research Project (ERC) and Scarlet: Working Women’s Organization.
On 31 December 2018, the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) passed the Prohibition of Consumption of Prostitution Law (Temporary Order and Amendment of Legislation) 5769-2018 (End Demand Law) and became the tenth country in the world to join the controversial regulatory experiment of criminalizing the purchase of sexual services.
The law is based on the perception that prostitution constitutes violence against women and that anyone involved other than the women engaged in prostitution is committing a criminal offense. The law was enacted after a struggle that took place over many years by a coalition of feminist organizations based on the approach that women engaged in prostitution are “survivors” of patriarchal violence, and that purchasing sexual services is negative and pathological behavior.
In the months preceding the legislation, sex workers began, for the first time in Israel, to organize and operate as a group to voice their opposition to the legislation. The workers established an organization “Argaman [“Scarlet” in English] – Organization of Working Women.” In doing so, they joined sex workers' organizations from around the world who oppose the deepening of criminalization of the sex industry and demand promotion of the rights of sex workers. Like many of these organizations, Scarlet also adopted the color red and red umbrellas as symbols of their struggle to promote the rights of sex workers.
The workers in the new organization claim that the law was enacted without consulting them and that the law will harm their rights and personal safety and security, expose them to violence and police harassment, reduce their bargaining power with their customers, and deepen the heavy stigma which accompanies work in the sex industry. As part of the Organization, the workers proclaimed a demand that nothing be imposed on them without their input (“nothing about us without us”). The sex workers demanded to be heard by decision makers and to take part in the process of designing policy, not as witnesses, but rather as active participants, because they know the situation best and the major impact of the law will be on their lives.
The event, organized with sex workers from Scarlet and in which activists from the organization participated, was dedicated to a critical discussion of the Israeli End Demand Law and its implications, and sought to delineate a path for promoting the rights of the sex workers in public policy.
Please check here for the program in Hebrew.
Conferences 2018-19
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