Law

Equal justice in present-day America is a myth. Millions are essentially blocked from accessing the civil justice system. A central factor in this predicament is the fees charged by attorneys, whose prohibitive rates prevent many Americans from asserting their legal rights. In order to ensure equal justice, it is, therefore, essential that measures be devised to counteract the effect of attorney fees on access to justice for low-and average-income individuals. While the civil justice system offers a variety of mechanisms designed to offset the effect of wealth disparities on access to justice (such as legal aid, fee-shifting statutes, and contingency fee arrangements), even when taken together, they are far from a sufficient remedy for the system's ills.

This article reports the results of an empirical study of the Israel Supreme Court (ISC). It covers the outcomes of 3,562 cases, all decided in 2006 and 2007, and describes the cases by subject area, litigant-pair characteristics, and source of jurisdiction--mandatory or discretionary. In mandatory jurisdiction cases ending with clear affirmances or reversals, the ISC affirmed lower court rulings in about 75% of district court criminal case appeals and about 67% of district court civil case appeals. In discretionary jurisdiction cases, the ISC rarely granted review. It agreed to review about 6% of petitions in criminal cases and about 15% of petitions in civil cases. In discretionary cases in which the ISC did grant review, it tended to reverse at a much higher rate than in mandatory jurisdiction cases, with an affirmance rate of 55% in criminal cases and 31% in civil cases. Combining denials of review with affirmances resulted in criminal case litigants obtaining relief from the ISC in 2.3% of appellate filings and civil case litigants obtaining relief in 11.0% of appellate filings. The government fared far better than other litigants in obtaining reversals of lower court rulings and in securing review of those rulings. Sentencing issues dominated the criminal docket and criminal cases predominated over civil cases. Reversal rates were not substantially different from those in cases with analogous jurisdiction in U.S. state courts of last resort except in discretionary jurisdiction civil cases. The ISC tended to reverse such cases at a higher rate than U.S. courts. *Eisenberg is Henry Allen Mark Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Statistical Sciences, Cornell University; Fisher is a senior lecturer at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law; Rosen-Zvi is a senior lecturer at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. We thank Na'ama Schlam for invaluable research assistance, for her insightful comments, and for coordinating the work with the students in a superb manner. We are also grateful to Efrat Zilberbush, Na'ama Daniel, Nitzan Ilani, and Gadi Ezra for their assistance in collecting the data. For excellent comments and suggestions we thank Daphne Barak-Erez, Ariel Porat, and Yoram Shachar.

We study 1,410 mandatory jurisdiction and 48 discretionary jurisdiction criminal law case outcomes in cases appealed to the Israel Supreme Court in 2006 and 2007 to assess influences on case outcomes. A methodological innovation is accounting for factors-case specialization, seniority, and workload-that modify random case assignment. To the extent one accounts for nonrandom assignment, one can infer that case outcome differences are judge effects. In mandatory jurisdiction cases, individual justices cast 3,986 votes and differed by as much as 15 percent in the probability of casting a vote favoring defendants. Female justices were about 2 to 3 percent more likely than male justices to vote for defendants but this effect is sensitive to including one justice. Defendant gender was associated with outcome, with female defendants about 17 percent more likely than male defendants to receive a favorable vote on appeal. Our data's samples of mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases allow us to show that studies limited to discretionary jurisdiction case outcomes can distort perceptions of judges' preferences. Justices' ordinal rank in rate of voting for defendants or the state was uncorrelated across mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases. For example, the justice who sat on the most criminal cases was the fourth (of 16 justices) most favorable to the state in mandatory jurisdiction cases but the 12th most favorable in discretionary jurisdiction cases. This result casts doubt on some inferences based on studies of judges on discretionary jurisdiction courts, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, in which only discretionary case outcomes are observed.

The creation of a "market for virtue" and social responsibility is dependent on the flow of information from the corporation to the responsible agents. To achieve a free flow of information, excessive, missing and unreliable information must be avoided. More generally, a market for virtue should make it possible to create the appropriate means to signal true commitments and enable informed agents to know how to effectively use their limited resources for deploying market power that rewards and sanctions the corporations that deserve such responses. The underlying assumption of this query is that if corporations in fact compete among themselves in the dimension of social responsibility, then some corporations will identify ways of demonstrating credibility of both efforts and results. The purpose of publishing codes of conduct and annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports would be to improve the level of information that is needed for the market for virtue to function. In order to assess the existence of a competitive market for virtue, the Article analyzes the codes and associated documents of sixteen multinational companies in three industries-textile, petrochemical and automobile. The Article finds some differences between labor and environmental norms, both within each of the sectors, as well as between sectors. However, the major finding casts doubt on the very assumption that labor and environmental norms are shaped by a

In the run-up to the global climate summit in Copenhagen (COP-15), 1 environmentalists, scientists, and politicians referred to it as a historical event. As COP-15 drew near, climate change activists and United Nations (UN) officials had high hopes that December 2009 would be a watershed moment for creating a new carbon-restricted global economy for decades to come. Furthermore, following the result of the 2008 American presidential elections, many in the international community felt that the path was clear to finally include the United States in the agreement that would replace the Kyoto Protocol, 2 and that developing nations-among them China and India-would also take on some binding and enforceable restrictions on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. The European Parliament even had lofty expectations that an

We thank Na'ama Schlam and Noam Guttman for their invaluable research assistance and insightful comments, as well as for coordinating the student work in a superb manner. We are also grateful to Efrat Zilberbush, Na'ama Daniel, Nitzan Ilani, and Gadi Ezra for their assistance in collecting the data.

More than one hundred executive departments and agencies operate through systems of regional offices strategically located around the country. Currently, these regions are misguidedly viewed as mere enforcers and implementers of central policies. We propose two alternative visions of federal regions—regions as mediators and regions as coordinators. These two visions have deep roots in the rich but forgotten history of U.S. public administration. In the New Deal era, federal regions were understood as mediating entities between the central government’s centralizing efforts and regional needs and conditions. With the expansion of federal programs and agencies in the 1950s and 1960s, federal regions were gradually reconceived as vehicles for coordination among the different branches of the administration as well as between the federal government and the states. Since the 1980s, however, federal regions have been seen as part of the oversized federal government and have thus been mistru...

Attorneys' fees fuel litigation, yet little is known about fees. Fee data are rarely available in the United States or in English rule, loser-pays jurisdictions. This Article analyzes fee awards in Israel, which vests judges with discretion to award fees, with loser pays operating as a norm. The 2641 cases studied constitute nearly all cases terminated by judgment in district courts in 2005, 2006, 2011, and 2012. Given many fee denials and fees that are well below client payments to attorneys when awarded, the Israeli fee system could reasonably be characterized as being more American than English. Moreover, judges use their discretion in a manner that reflects redistributive sensitivity. Fees were awarded to prevailing parties in 72.8%

Attorneys' fees fuel litigation, yet little is known about fees. Fee data are rarely available in the United States or in English rule, loser-pays jurisdictions. This Article analyzes fee awards in Israel, which vests judges with discretion to award fees, with loser pays operating as a norm. The 2641 cases studied constitute nearly all cases terminated by judgment in district courts in 2005, 2006, 2011, and 2012. Given many fee denials and fees that are well below client payments to attorneys when awarded, the Israeli fee system could reasonably be characterized as being more American than English. Moreover, judges use their discretion in a manner that reflects redistributive sensitivity. Fees were awarded to prevailing parties in 72.8%