Gad Barzilai

Abstract
Theoretical literature on courts, society and politics is usually divided between the attitudinal and the strategic institutional models in efforts to explicate courts' rulings and their judicial behavior. In this context of empirical analysis of judicial behavior, using insights from both models, we focus on judicial preferences of individual judges as a key for theoretical and empirical analysis of courts as institutional player. Accordingly, we offer to explicate Supreme Courts through an original examination of Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as High Court of Justice (HCJ) looking into it as a dominant veto point. 

We have originally coded individual rulings creating a data set that includes more than 9000 judicial decisions made by forty-six judges on the Israeli Supreme Court, between 1995 till 2015. It covers the judicial stint of four Supreme Court Presidents. Among many original and challenging empirical findings, we find that HCJ judges uphold appeals against the government if those appeals are especially turned against the state’s religious institutions and if at least one judge on the bench is dissenting. We find that this judicial behavior varies due to judges’ preferences rather than the judicial preferences of the Court’s President or the political nature of the government and its coalition in the Parliament. Furthermore, unlike a prevailing perception of Israeli Supreme Court Presidents as the sole leaders of the HCJ, there are times when Supreme Court Presidents find themselves in a minority position within the Court that they supposedly lead. Thus, the veto point of the HCJ is a dynamic arena which its policy outputs stem from the preferences of judges behaving as a group of institutional veto players rather than a cohesive veto point.
Our analyses repeatedly unveil that there is variance between court decisions that can be consistent with the judges’ preferences and consequent judicial activism. Hence, our findings call for a research program focused on individual judicial preferences as the key to further understanding of institutional behavior of Supreme Courts in parliamentary settings looking at judges as veto players whose rulings (decisions) are far from being self-evident.

The intersection of law and protest may be perceived as an oxymoron. For many, law symbolizes stability and the maintenance of the socio-political and economic status quo while, at the same time, protecting human rights. Protest, conversely, points to the need to alter and reform the very same status quo, arguing that the conventional means of constructing politics and public policy through legislation and litigation have failed and that democratic and all other perceptions of justice have been halted. Nonethe-less, more than a few protest movements all around the globe have used lawyers, legal arguments, and legal mechanisms to advance social visions of an egalitarian society (see, e.g., McCann 1994; Sarat and Scheingold 1998). Especially after World War I, jurists held leading positions in protest movements, and legal arguments were regarded as relevant and efficient mechanisms to negotiate with political power.

Abstract This first empirical investigation of support for federative solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict among the Jewish political leadership and general public of Israel suggests that, despite the Palestinian Intifada and the Gulf War, there is a potential basis within Israel for ...

Armed Forces & Society http://afs.sagepub.com/ The Use of Force: Israeli Public Opinion on Military Options Gad Barzilai and Efraim Inbar Armed Forces & Society 1996 23: 49 DOI: 10.1177/0095327X9602300103 The online version of this article can be found at: http://afs ...

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.