Research Grants

The past two decades have witnessed a series of technological developments that enabled the emergence of the “sharing economy” – online platforms that promote the sharing of goods, services, resources and talents among users through the Internet. This project focuses on peer-to-peer market platforms in which consumers pay to access goods and services for a period of time – like peer-to-peer financing (e.g. Prosper, Zopa), product markets (eBay) and short-term accommodations (e.g. AirBnB, Homeway). Whereas the emerging sharing economy enables more appealing and more ethical consumption options, as well as the creation of collaborative web communities, an emerging body of literature suggests that disparities in peer-to-peer online markets are significant in magnitude and implications. Yet, while this emerging body of literature is able to show that women and Black sellers and hosts are disadvantaged in peer-to-peer online markets, the data could not answer the question of why and how such disadvantages are obtained and whether they are similar in magnitude and causes to discrimination in other off-line markets. This project empirically investigates inequality and discrimination in the sharing economy and, as a result contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the cyber system should be regulated.

We examine the effects of Volkswagen’s emissions scandal (“Dieselgate”) on the secondary car market in Israel. Using administrative data on all car transactions in Israel, we measure the scandal’s effect on the number and the composition of transactions involving used vehicles made by the Volkswagen Group. We also use data from the leading classified ad website and measure the effect of the scandal on the resale price of used Volkswagen vehicles. According to our findings, the Volkswagen emissions scandal had a statistically significant negative effect on the number of transactions involving vehicles made by Volkswagen (nearly -18.0%) and on their resale price (nearly -6.0%). We also find that the reduction in the number of transactions was driven mostly by private sellers and that non-private sellers barely shied away from the market. 

The Safra Grant of 2018-2019 was dedicated primarily to the completion of a book manuscript and its submission to Oxford University Press and a completion of an article on the history of the rise and fall of the Chartered Company. I enclose the abstract of both research projects.

1. Veiled Power: International Law and the Private Business Corporation, 1886–1981 (OUP, Forthcoming) [~120,000 words].
This book presents a historical study of the international law of the private business corporation. It exposes and explores how international legal doctrines, practices, and institutions constituted a regulatory framework for the operation of businesses throughout the twentieth century. Until now, the relationship between businesses and interenational law has been embedded in a narrative of marginalization and failure, which this book now seeks to challenge. This book attempts to replace the unchallenged history of the irrelevance of international law to the question of business enterprises with a history of its facilitative role in constituting an economic order that proved highly beneficial to interests in the Global North.
The book draws inspiration from scholarship on the history of international trade law, international investment law, the history of global governance, and political economic analysis of international law, and connects these specialized fields in a single lens: the corporate form. The point of departure for this history is the simultaneous emergence of international law as a modern legal discipline and the turn to free incorporation in corporate law during the last third of the nineteenth century. The book demonstrates how the interplay between the sovereign veil of the state and the corporate veil of the company insulated corporations from responsibility and rendered them invisible to legal scrutiny. In the 1950s, decolonized nations began to turn the tables against powerful nations and business corporations by using the same ideas of the sovereign and corporate veils against unruly
corporate power. Amid the menace of the old international legal vocabulary in the service of new states, capital-exporting countries sought an alternative legal framework that would eventually hold sway—the new regime of international investment law.

2. Chartered International Law: The Rise and Fall of Chartered Companies in Africa, 1881-1923 (will be submitted to American Journal of Legal History during September).
The period between 1870 and 1914 saw particularly rapid levels of private business corporation-creation; from the 1880s, the numbers and size of multinationals grew rapidly. The 1880s mark the formative period of international law as a legal discipline and the turn to the privately-incorporated business corporation as a global actor, and thus constitutes an important turning point in the global history and theory of corporations. This article analyzes the rise and fall of the chartered company during the Scramble for Africa and examines its implications for the regulatory influence of international law on business practices in the forthcoming decades.
International lawyers of the late-nineteenth century sought to bring order to the messy legal landscape in Africa by dictating who was to be considered a sovereign (the imperial government) and who was not (the company); what was legitimate monopoly (sovereign monopoly over violence) and what was not (monopoly over trade); or who was the harbinger of humanity (the civilizing imperial government) and who was not (the company men, with their devotion to profit). But reading their commentaries alongside the experience of post-charter companies challenges this tidying-up endeavor. The move away from the chartered company to the post-charter business enterprise did not necessarily result in the resumption of responsible governance on the part of the imperial state. Nor did business enterprises make a radical shift away from the practices associated with the charter era. Rather than a history of a clear rupture from informal to formal empire or a move to a clearer distinction between public and private, the shift from chartered to private business corporations was not a transition from informal empire (through the chartered company) to formal empire (governmental colonial rule), but rather a transition to a different modality of informal and flexible alliance between governments and private corporations.

The class action is a unique procedure. Unlike an individual lawsuit, which is filed by a plaintiff who then makes the main litigation decisions, a class action is initiated and controlled by the class attorney. In many class actions, it is the attorney who identifies the cause of action, selects the representative plaintiff, and decides how to litigate, whether to settle and for how much.

The class action thus raises unique ethical dilemmas which span the relationships between the attorney and the representative plaintiff, between the attorney and the represented class, among class members, and between them and the representative plaintiff. In addition, the class action implicates questions regarding the attorney’s duties to the court and the defendant, questions that are, by and large, absent in ordinary litigation. 

Despite the increasing surge of class action filings since the enactment of the Class Action Law in 2006, there is almost no discussion of these ethical issues in Israeli literature, and their consideration by the courts is rare. Also, the Israeli bar’s professional code of ethics has not been adjusted for the specific concerns raised by class actions, and it does not address many of their distinctive features.

The proposed research will examine these issues from a broad and comprehensive perspective, addressing the specific characteristics of the legal profession, the significant role of entrepreneurial lawyering in class actions, and the unique features and objectives of the class action procedure. One of the goals of the proposed research is to construct a professional code of ethics that would guide class attorneys’ conduct, realize the goals of class actions and minimize their inherent problems and costs.

Current developments in information technology, and especially the widespread transformation of information into data, suggest that we are on the cusp of a new historical epoch. On the one hand, algorithms allow the individual an expanded range of choice, revealing “preferences” that the individual herself could not have been aware of on her own; these revelations in turn may form the basis of new connections, deepened interests and emotional investments, or in short, new identities. In this sense, data analysis contributes to a qualitative jump in the experience of information, in line with the movement of modernity. On the other hand, algorithmic individualization – in personalized medicine, in the tailoring of consumer supply to data-revealed tastes (channeling, and perhaps manufacturing demand), in the cabining of options on offer – is indeed a heightened individualization, but one that makes choice redundant. The individual becomes a data set uniquely pointing to certain outcomes; the individual might be called on to affirm or reject (to click or not to click), but the process of forming preferences has been qualitatively altered.

Many aspects of the issues raised here have been studied, but we aim to offer a consolidation of fields that will offer new insight. Our ambition is to transcend the disciplinary boundaries that typically limit academic appreciation of the big picture by merging historical, economic, institutional and normative perspectives.

The registers of experience and control never exist in isolation; their relationship is not mechanical, but also not so mysterious that it cannot be accounted for. We hope to generate an analytic framework that can make sense of the interplay between these two registers, using historical ideal types as a rough guide. We intend to pursue the research in two tiers. The first tier comprises field level analyses of new information technologies, and runs in two directions. First, the impact of technologies on the use, organization and control of information, especially the transformation of information into analyzable and marketable data. This aspect of the research deals with institutional change, and focuses on the legal and regulatory realms; second, the impact of technologies on the lived experience of information by individuals. The culmination of the first tier of the research will be an account of the dynamic interaction between these two aspects – explaining how institutional change and the experience of information feed into one another.

The second tier of the research is geared toward normative assessment. The initial steps toward such assessment are historical and analytical. They will provide a synoptic overview illuminating the risks and opportunities that changes in the experience and control of information present. Because we see that situation as a critical juncture, as possibly a moment of the constitution of a genuinely new phase in history, the normative inquiry is far-reaching and open-ended. It may alter not simply the way we view the relationship between technology and information, but also our most basic sense of the nature and value of individuality, of choice, of markets, of communal interaction, and of politics.

The Proposed study asks to tie the evolving field of “The History of the Book”, which deals with textual knowledge and its production, with the historical-phenomenological research concerning the religious law, state law and regulation, and their attitude towards the ethics of knowledge transmission. This cultural interjunction takes place in a historical context which characterized by a technological shift, economical pressure and political tension between coexisting societies, namely: A Jewish minority society and a Christian majority society.

The mid-fifteenth century’s invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg lead to the development of a new sixteenth century book market. The new market was highly competitive, full of technological innovations, literary thefts and industrial espionages. The wild market was soon to take a serious percentage of the income of some major European cities and to be answered by a branched regulation of printing permissions, developed system of censorship and unprecedented copyrights laws.

The Hebrew books market was working under the tension created by two parallel, sometime contradictory, systems of law. The first one was the Papal law, who aimed to control the Jewish minority as citizens of lower status. This status had a complicated nature, while the Jewish literature was considered as a threat for the Christian majority, a threat that was emphasized by the historical overtones of the mutual Jewish-Christian tradition. The Papal law limited the possibility to publish Hebrew books and gave the permission to publish only to certain publishers. The other system is the partly independent Jewish Halakhic legal system, to whom the workers and the customers of the Hebrew book industry belonged. Jewish workers, readers and scholars turned to this system in order to regularize the production of problematic books, or to legalize the copyright of certain book or edition for limited period. The fact that the Jewish books market was subject to two parallel and sometime contradictory systems of law, in a time both of those, themselves stood in the middle of deep process of change, created a dynamic feedback effect, full of ups and downs.

This project will describe the complicated ethical perceptions regarding knowledge production and their regulative expressions in both legal systems and the way in which those parallel systems created close relationships, where one was built on the top of the other and while the other was using the lacunae created by the first. This research will be built upon a careful, historical investigation and legal-ethical description of certain case studies in which those both systems were put in motion, parallelly, even if not necessarily in a harmonious way. The expected result is a thicker, historical. ethical and cultural description of the way in which in this historical turning point to modernity, Jewish book market and its ethics were formed and designed.