In contrast to American understandings of abortion as a uniquely tragic dilemma, the Israeli abortion issue is a tangential controversy in a larger debate over the relationship between the state's national and democratic identity. The divergent paths of abortion politics in Israel and the United States reflect important differences in underlying religious doctrines, geographical size, feminist ideologies, and the immediacy of other social cleavages. More profoundly, the two abortion stories are the product of distinct understandings of the mutual obligations between citizens and their state and of the relationship between individual and collective rights and duties. While these differences may account for the capacity of Israeli activists on both sides to forge pragmatic compromises, the stability of these policies is uncertain both because of changing Israeli priorities and the import of American conceptions of the abortion dispute.

Disputes between officials and citizens during tax enforcement differ from most civil disputes between citizens in several ways: They are initiated when the officiat claims the citizen has not followed the law; they are fundumentally about the cowect interpretation of the law; and the official has the formal power to end the dispute within the enforcement arena by making a decision that is legally binding on the citizen. Using data from pre-audit interviews with taxpayers and state tax auditors, we explore how these characteristics of tax disputes, the roles of the parties, citizens' perceptions of the attitudes and orientations of the officials, and other contextual factors drawn from regulatory and procedural justice research affect the strategies officials and citizens prefer for resolving disputes. We close with some evidence on the predictive rekwance of the strategic preferences of the parties in combination with their roles: For new resolutions to emerge, the party with the power must be open to them, and the subordinate party must have the assertiveness to present them. We also explorate how the analysis may be extended to other enforcement and regulatory settings.

At the wheels of railroads and streetcars, the law of accidental personal injury, known as negligence, became a discrete body of law between 1870 and 1920. The defining component of negligence was “fault”–the notion that the individuals (injured and injurer) must have failed to act according to some minimal standard of caution. Theorists of the history of negligence have explained that the conduct of all was measured against what a “reasonable man” would have done under the circumstances. The author here challenges this fundamental assertion. Through trial records, lawyer's written arguments, and appellate opinions, she reconstructs the critical role of gender in shaping the law of accidental injury. As she argues, in 19th- and 20th-century America, injury was a gendered event. The fact that courts in these years held men and women to different standards of care undermines theorists' arguments that economic considerations drove the law of accidental injury. Moreover, the reification of gender nm in private law, in turn, vitally affected the experience of gender in turn-of-the-century America.