School violence in the eyes of the beholders: an integrative aggression-victimization perspective

Five experiments explored, within the framework of functional measurement, the importance assigned by 3rd and 4th graders (n = 117) to expectations of potential perpetrators from their potential victims. Each participant was requested to imagine potential incidents of school violence where four familiar classmates were presented as protagonists (i.e., perpetrator and victim). An orderly manipulation of the combination of the level (high or low) of aggressiveness and susceptibility to victimization in each protagonist was made. The participants were informed whether or not the victim was about to deliver tangible rewards, display signs of suffering, or retaliate (2*2*2 = 8 conditions). For each potential incident, the participant estimated the likelihood that an attack will take place. The following order of importance was found: Reward > Retaliation > Suffering. Victim's aggressiveness was slightly effective. From an applied perspective, most notable is the tendency to lower the likelihood of violence when the educator knows about the incidents.     

How Law Changes the Environmental Mind: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Legal Norms on Moral Perceptions and Civic Enforcement

This paper examines how different legal instruments affect people's moral intuitions and willingness to engage in social enforcement in the field of environmental law. These instruments vary in terms of their governance technique, the process through which they were enacted, and their allocation of enforcement responsibilities. Their effect on citizens' moral evaluation and emotional reaction to corporate polluting behaviour are examined, based on an experimental survey of a representative sample of 1400 individuals in Israel.
Our findings demonstrate that their design influences people's level of moral and emotional resentment when faced by environmentally problematic behaviour, as well as their motivation to engage in private enforcement. The design of the regulatory instrument could thus generate biases in social reactions to polluting behaviour, irrespective of its actual ecological adverse effect. We analyse the moral and psychological mechanisms which underlie these effects and explore their various policy implications.     

Motivating Environmental Action in a Pluralistic Regulatory Environment: An Experimental Study of Framing,Crowding Out,and Institutional Effects in the Context of Recycling Policies

In designing a recycling policy, the regulator must choose among multiple instruments. Our study seeks to address the linkages between the choice of regulatory instruments and institutional frameworks, people's intrinsic motivation, and various attitudinal measures. We examined the behavioral repercussions of several instruments that are used widely in recycling regulation, using an experimental survey on a representative sample of the Israeli population (N = 1,800 participants). Our findings suggest that the design of recycling policies should be sensitive to the framing effects of varied regulatory instruments and to the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on the desirability and efficacy of the law. In particular, we point out the potential regulatory advantage of using deposit schemes over other instruments and of using private organizations as regulatory agents. Drawing on these findings, we discuss the potential value of using differentiated regulatory policies to provide incentives for recycling in societies characterized by broad heterogeneity in levels of intrinsic motivation.     

Toward a General Margin of Appreciation Doctrine in International Law?

Three recent International Court of Justice decisions –Oil Platforms, Avena and Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory– highlight the uncertain status of the margin of appreciationdoctrine in the Court’s jurisprudence. The purpose ofthis article is to evaluate, in the light of contemporary practiceof other courts, the current status under international lawof the margin of appreciation doctrine, which encourages internationalcourts to exercise restraint and flexibility when reviewingthe decisions of national authorities, and to offer preliminaryguidelines for future application. The article also discussesa variety of policy arguments concerning the legitimacy andeffectiveness of international courts, which can be raised insupport of the development of a general margin of appreciationdoctrine with relation to some categories of international lawnorms governing state conduct, and it examines potential criticism.Eventually, it argues that the same considerations which haveled to the creation of ‘margin of appreciation type’doctrines in the domestic law of many states and in the contextof specific international regimes (for instance, the EuropeanConvention on Human Rights) also support the introduction ofthe doctrine into general international law. The position ofthe ICJ towards the application of the doctrine therefore meritsreconsideration.     

Prisoners' perception of informing to the authorities: an analysis in terms of functional moral judgment

A series of functional measurement experiment show that prisoners modulate their moral judgments of violations of their in-group regulations. The participants were 67 women and 80 men, sentenced for at least three years for murder, robbery, drug-traffic or white collar offenses. Each was asked, individually, to imagine a series of incidents where incriminating information on in-group or out-group inmates is delivered to the prison authorities or to an ingroup source and to rate the deserved denigration of the informer, who was characterized as a leader or not and as a drug-addict or not who had a prison-leave or not. An assignment of approximately equal weight for social status, drug use and prison leave was found, beyond gender and type of offense. In line with the hypothesis of judgmental modularity, informing to an out-group source was judged much more severely than informing to in-group arbiter and than informing on an out-group inmate.     

Is there only One Correct Legal Answer to a Question of Fact? Three Talmudic Answers to a Jurisprudential Dilemma

This article focuses on questions of pure fact‐of‐the‐matter and asks whether two omniscient judges (or jurists or scholars) may disagree over the legal answer to a straightforward question of a matter of fact. There are approaches to legal theory among some western and Jewish philosophers of law whereby at least superficially it is possible that two or more contradictory legal statements regarding a given reality can be equally correct. The article provides a critical analysis of three different models derived from the Jewish legal literature, and reviews the contributions of Jewish sources to the understanding of the phenomenon of disagreements concerning matters of fact.     

Decentralized enforcement in organizations: An experimental approach

Social enforcement, the decentralized action by organizational actors of monitoring, identifying, and reporting legal violations, is widely recognized as a key factor in ensuring good governance. This article reports on an experimental survey conducted in the US and Israel examining the behavior of individuals when confronting workplace unlawful conduct. The study provides novel insights into the relationships between state based, organization based, and employee based enforcement. It finds that the likelihood and the manner of reporting will vary depending on the type of illegality and are strongly correlated to perceptions of legitimacy, job security, and voice within the workplace. Comparing illegalities, employees prefer to report clear violations by rank and file employees rather than violations by managers. At the same time, external reporting to government or media entities is most likely when violations involve the organization as a whole or implicate top management. The study also finds cultural and gender differences in reporting patterns. Finally, the study provides support for the understanding that social norms are more predictive of social enforcement than expected organizational costs.     

A Development of Modest Proportions: The Application of the Principle of Proportionality in the Targeted Killings Case

The comment critically discusses the application of the principleof proportionality by the Israeli Supreme Court in the TargetedKillings case. While the judgment confirms the customary statusof the principle and its applicability to all Israel DefenseForces (IDF) military operations during armed conflicts, itssubstantive contents remain, as might have been expected, unclear.In particular, the application of the ‘least-injuriousalternative’ subtest with regard to all civilians takinga direct part in hostilities is unsubstantiated and perhapstoo sweeping. However, the reference by the Court to ex anteand ex post review mechanisms to monitor the application ofthe proportionality principle constitutes a positive contributionto its development under international humanitarian law, whichmight also have some implications for criminal prosecutionsof soldiers and commanders involved in unlawful targeted killingoperations.     

The Zionist–Arab incident of Zarnuqa 1913: a chronicle and several methodological remarks

The article deals with the Zarnuqa incident which took place on 23 July 1913 between the colonists and guards of Rehovot, and the Arab rural population in their vicinity, an incident which is considered by historians as a milestone in Zionist–Arab relations in late Ottoman Palestine. The aim of the article is to present the various narratives available to researchers today, starting with the various Jewish sources, then examining the Arabic sources and, finally, external ones. We analyse each of the sources and draw general conclusions about the sources historians can use today when studying this formative period of Zionist–Arab early encounters. The decision to examine several different narratives provides a multidimensional perspective on the event. Our aim is not to determine whose narrative is closer to historical reality (which would certainly be elusive), or to find out who started the fight and who is to be blamed but rather to present the different narratives, how each side described the event, and what the narrators chose to emphasize and what to omit. The article illustrates the difficult task facing historians dealing with late Ottoman Palestine, the period of the early Zionist–Arab encounter and conflict.