Issachar Rosen-Zvi

Does the Judge Matter? Exploiting Random Assignment on a Court of Last Resort to Assess Judge and Case Selection Effects

We study 1410 criminal law 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. Individual justices cast 3986 votes and differed by as much as 15 percent in the probability of casting a vote favoring defendants. Female justices were about two to three 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 full 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 twelfth most favorable in discretionary jurisdiction cases. This result casts doubt on studies of judges on discretionary jurisdiction courts, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, in which votes in the selection process are not observed.

The Political Premises of Contemporary Urban Concepts: The Global City, the Sustainable City, the Resilient City, the Creative City, and the Smart City

Abstract Numerous studies have focused on the global city, the sustainable city, the resilient city, the creative city, and the smart city, analyzing their politics, ideologies, and social implications. However, the literature lacks synthetic analysis that addresses these concepts by juxtaposing them and exploring their similarities and differences. This paper provides synthetic analysis, followed by a discussion of the concepts’ competing and complementary logics of governance and citizenship. The concluding section addresses the importance of taking into account these diverse concepts as political ideas and discusses how these concepts become a prescriptive mix promoted by public officials and private developers.

Climate Change Governance: Mapping the Terrain

The world of regulation, in general, and that of environmental regulation, in particular, has undergone major transformation over the last four decades. From the traditional state-centered “command and control” (C&C) regulation of the 1970s to market-based instruments (still marshaled by states) that characterized the turn of the century and then to the various types of new governance mechanisms that are in vogue today.1 The novel approaches to governance – referred to in the literature as new governance, regulatory capitalism or soft law – which are based on legally non-enforceable norms, authored, controlled and monitored by various state, quasi-state and non-state actors, have emerged as a result of both a shift in the way norms are produced and a widespread discontent with the efficacy of conventional models of regulation. The grand failures of international climate change negotiations, which are rooted in deep structural discrepancies among nations rather than ad-hoc disagreements, require a fresh and innovative thinking that would pave the way to overcoming traditional state politics and facilitate progress on the climate change front. One option that should be explored is the new governance schemes that have evolved over the last two decades. This article seeks to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of the regulatory tools embedded in the notion of new governance and explore their implications on climate change regulation. Part II of the article discusses the many facets of the notion of regulation. It argues that the study of regulation, and particularly that of climate change governance, should go beyond traditional state or even transnational regulation to encompass hybrid regulatory forms which blur the distinction between the public and the private and destabilize the boundaries between the global, the national and Climate Change Governance: Mapping the Terrain 234 CCLR 2|2011