Is Law Unbounded? Property Rights and Control of Social Groupings

This review essay follows up on a suggested model for resolving problems of neighborhood externalities and exclusionary associational patterns in metropolitan areas. The model is based on a property rights regime of “alienable entitlements,” as articulated by Lee Anne Fennell in The Unbounded Home (2009). The essay frames this model as promoting a groundbreaking approach to the fundamental quandary over the role of law as a tool for broad-based social change and asks if legal rules can fully absorb the multiple types of societal effects that influence the nature of contemporary homeownership. It assesses the normative desirability and practical feasibility of controlling social exclusion through property rights.     

Prolonged Armed Conflict and Diminished Deference to the Military: Lessons from Israel

We examine whether the level of deference shown by the Israeli Supreme Court to military decisions has changed over time by empirically analyzing the entire body of Supreme Court decisions in petitions against the military commander between 1990 and 2005. Setting forth a number of different factors that might generally affect the degree of deference to state agencies, we hypothesized that there would be a decrease in deference in the relationship between the Court and the military commander during the examined period. Our findings show that deference to the military commander has indeed diminished significantly. We argue that this is best explained by the continuation of the armed conflict (and its aftermath, namely, the routinization and increase in the number of petitions by the civilian population) and also—to some extent—by the rise of a substantive rule-of-law legal consciousness, central to which is the importance of human rights.     

The optimal jury size when jury deliberation follows a random walk

The existing literature does not agree on the optimal jury size. We demonstrate that the probability of type I and type II errors is not sensitive to the number of jurors under the following three conditions: jurors receive independent signals about a defendant’s guilt during the evidence stage of the trial; the jurors truthfully reveal their signals before deliberations begin through their votes on the first ballot; and the jury’s deliberation follows a random walk. Since the opportunity cost of jury service is positive, this implies an optimal jury size of one.     

Perception of epistemic authorities by children and adolescents

The study investigated children's and adolescents' perceptions of epistemic authorities in various knowledge domains. Children and adolescents from 4th, 8th, and 12th grades were asked to evaluate their father, mother, teacher, and friends as epistemic authorities in nine areas of knowledge content. In general, the results indicated that the perception of parents as epistemic authorities decreases with age. Nevertheless, children and adolescents continue to consider one or both parents to be the most important epistemic authorities. The perception of friends as epistemic authority increased relative to other sources in the social domains of knowledge. The perception of teachers as epistemic authority decreases with age, but in the formal knowledge domain it remains relatively stable.Received Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Research interests concern media psychology, knowledge formation, and school psychology. Requests for reprints should be sent to Amiram Raviv at Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel 69978.Received Ph.D. in psychology from University of Pittsburgh. Research interests concern political psychology, social psychology of knowledge, and stereotyping.Received Ph.D. in statistics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Research interests concern nonparametric statistics and applied statistics.Received M.A. degree in clinical child psychology from Tel Aviv University.     

Alcohol use among college students: Some competing hypotheses

This paper presents a longitudinal study of alcohol use among college students. Three hypothesized predictors of alcohol use are found to have an independent effect when the other predictors and prior drinking are held constant: the drinking context of the dormitory living group, informal social involvement in college, and lack of commitment to religious and academic values. These predictors are also related to the onset of drinking during the freshman year for those who entered college as abstainers. The pattern varies somewhat for males and females, with the dormitory contextual effect larger for females. Formal involvement in college activities and psychological stress have no independent effect on drinking. The results are discussed in relation to previous work on alcohol use.This research was supported in part by NIAAA Grant AA02863 and NIMH Grant MH28177 and Veterans Administration Research funds.Received Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1976. Current research interests include adolescent development, statistics, and environmental studies.Received Ph.D. in psychology from University of California, Berkeley, in 1960. Current research interests are personal and environmental influences on behavior.     

The clown's carnival in the hospital: a semiotic analysis of the medical clown's performance

The medical clown's multimodal performance in the hospital takes place within its rigid space. A clown in a hospital is a paradox. “Medical clowning” is a metaphor taken from two seemingly unrelated fields of meaning, juxtaposing what is medical, scientific, serious and logical with clowning, emotions, carnival spirit and humour. The clown addresses barriers erected by illness, pain, alienation and distress with a continuous flexible performance of humour and fantasy tailored to changing conditions and circumstances. A clown, by definition, threatens the public order and seemingly has no place in the hospital paradigm. The current article compares medical clowns to carnival clowns, examines the medical clown's flexible performance, illustrates it with case studies, presents a semiotic analysis of the clown's journey through the hospital and examines the significance of the performance on the ideological level.     

New localism or fuzzy centralism: policymakers’ perceptions of public education and involvement in education

This research examines local authority involvement in education as a function of local policymakers’ perceptions of education as a public service – namely, whether public education is for the benefit of society as a whole, or for individual students and parents. Perceptions of education and involvement in education were assessed through 107 questionnaires returned by mayors and heads of local education departments in Israel. The results show that (1) local policymakers tend to perceive public education as a general public service, and (2) the relationship between this perception and involvement in education varies with the locality’s centre-periphery status. In peripheral localities, perceiving education as a general public service and an understanding of ‘society’ as the local community leads to greater involvement in education. In central localities, involvement rose with a more individualised perception. Implications of the findings are discussed in line with viewing education in the spirit of new localism.     

Demographic correlates of adolescents' helping behavior

The helping behavior of 250 sixth-grade children was assessed by four different measures and related to several demographic variables. The results indicated that (a) more girls were helpful than boys; (b) more children of European-American and Israeli origin were helpful than those of Asian — (North) African origin; (c) more children having fathers with a high level of education were helpful than those having fathers with a low level of education; and (d) more secondborn children were helpful than firstborn. These results are explained and their importance indicated.The study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid from Tel-Aviv University.Received Ph.D. from Hebrew University. Current interests are prosocial behavior and school climate.Received Ph.D. from University of Pittsburgh. Current interests are prosocial behavior and the social psychology of education.     

Asymmetric Two-Stage Group Rent-Seeking: Comparison of Two Contest Structures

Two variations of a two-stage rent-seeking contest areconsidered. In the first stage of the Between-Groupmodel, groups compete through the expenditure of resources bytheir members. Based on group expenditures, one winning groupis probabilistically determined. On the second stage, membersof the winning group compete with one another for an exogenousprize. In the Semi-Finals model a player is chosen fromeach group and then these players compete for the prize.Groups differ in size or in their valuation of the prize.Subgame-perfect equilibrium solutions are constructed forthese two contest structures.