Assessing the Performance of a Court System: A Comprehensive Performance Measures Approach

Many court systems suffer from long lead times, poor service quality, and low throughput. In many cases improvements are continuously introduced through various managerial and professional methods. This article proposes a set of measures to assess the effectiveness of court systems. This set of performance measures includes response-time, throughput, and work-in-process. While court systems generate a multitude of statistical data it is difficult to apply them across individual courts.

The article tailors well established generic performance measures to the specific court arena. The individual measures are aggregated into a single figure that assesses the court's performance along the time axis and relative to comparable court systems.

The proposed measure of performance and the aggregate score were validated with real life figures from the Israeli court system.     

Winds of change: How street-level bureaucrats actively represent minority clients by influencing majority clients—The context of LGB Israeli teachers

The literature dealing with representative bureaucracy emphasizes the role that minority street-level bureaucrats may play when, directly and indirectly, they actively represent clients with whom they share a common identity. My study goes further, contributing to the implementation literature, by examining why and how these street-level bureaucrats use their discretion to shape non-minority clients' attitudes toward minorities. I explore this phenomenon empirically through interviews with 36 Israeli lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) teachers. I analyze the traditional methods they routinely adopt, such as exposing students to information about minorities, encouraging open discussions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) issues in the classroom, and entrepreneurially developing and introducing innovative learning programs. I illustrate how they respond to ad hoc cases (e.g., protecting LGBTQ+ clients or taking advantage of outside events to promote understanding of relevant issues) and the approach of leading by example.     

Group Segregation and Urban Violence

How does segregation shape intergroup violence in contested urban spaces? Should nominal rivals be kept separate or instead more closely integrated? We develop an empirically grounded agent‐based model to understand the sources and patterns of violence in urban areas, employing Jerusalem as a demonstration case and seeding our model with microlevel, geocoded data on settlement patterns. An optimal set of parameters is selected to best fit the observed spatial distribution of violence in the city, with the calibrated model used to assess how different levels of segregation, reflecting various proposed “virtual futures” for Jerusalem, would shape violence. Our results suggest that besides spatial proximity, social distance is key to explaining conflict over urban areas: arrangements conducive to reducing the extent of intergroup interactions—including localized segregation, limits on mobility and migration, partition, and differentiation of political authority—can be expected to dampen violence, although their effect depends decisively on social distance.