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 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.

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.

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.