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Real-world healthcare data hold the potential to identify therapeutic solutions for progressive diseases by efficiently pinpointing safe and efficacious repurposing drug candidates. This approach circumvents key early clinical development challenges, particularly relevant for neurological diseases, concordant with the vision of the 21st Century Cures Act. However, to-date, these data have been utilized mainly for confirmatory purposes rather than as drug discovery engines. Here, we demonstrate the usefulness of real-world data in identifying drug repurposing candidates for disease- modifying effects, specifically candidate marketed drugs that exhibit beneficial effects on Parkinson’s disease (PD) progression. We performed an observational study in cohorts of ascertained PD patients extracted from two large medical databases, Explorys SuperMart (N=88,867) and IBM MarketScan Research Databases (N=106,395); and applied two conceptually different, well-established causal inference methods to estimate the effect of hundreds of drugs on delaying dementia onset as a proxy for slowing PD progression. Using this approach, we identified two drugs that manifested significant beneficial effects on PD progression in both datasets: rasagiline, narrowly indicated for PD motor symptoms; and zolpidem, a psycholeptic. Each confers its effects through distinct mechanisms, which we explored via a comparison of estimated effects within the drug classification ontology. We conclude that analysis of observational healthcare data, emulating otherwise costly, large, and lengthy clinical trials, can highlight promising repurposing candidates, to be validated in prospective registration trials, for common, late-onset progressive diseases for which disease-modifying therapeutic solutions are scarce.

Numerous studies have focused on the global city, the sustainable city, the resilient city, the creative city, and the smart city, analyzing their politics, ideologies, and social implications. However, the literature lacks synthetic analysis that addresses these concepts by juxtaposing them and exploring their similarities and differences. This paper provides synthetic analysis, followed by a discussion of the concepts’ competing and complementary logics of governance and citizenship. The concluding section addresses the importance of taking into account these diverse concepts as political ideas and discusses how these concepts become a prescriptive mix promoted by public officials and private developers.

The last chapter of tractate Berakhot (“Benedictions”) is exceptional. It does not discuss the set daily liturgy, as does the rest of the tractate, but rather presents benedictions to be said following encounters with various phenomena, both seen and heard. These benedictions carry none of the permanence of the fixed liturgy, but are reflexive to the world around them. This makes the closing chapter a rare depository of information about the rabbinic world view. In this list of phenomena and their appropriate liturgical responses, the discerning reader can detect the manner in which the rabbis theologically conceptualize the world around them. This article focuses on the benediction that opens the chapter—for miracles—and the discussions about it in the two Talmuds. A close reading of these discussions reveals some of the ways in which rabbis in Roman Palestine and Sassanian Babylonia explained miracles and account for their (non)existence in their own reality.

The goy has been present in Jewish discourses since antiquity. Despite this, its birth and history have received almost no scholarly attention. In this paper we shift the focus from the various historical attitudes towards the goy, to the very constitution of the concept and the dichotomy it constructs. We claim that scholars have been anachronistically reading Jewish (or Judaean) texts from the centuries before the common era as if they contained the Jew/goy distinction. Through a series of readings in texts like Jubilees, Pseudo-Aristeas, Joseph and Aseneth, 1-4 Maccabees, the Damascus Document, we seek to demonstrate the plurality of options for separation that existed before the Jew/goy discourse took over.

This chapter examines a loose groups of texts from the Second Temple period, tracing some early and scattered evidence of an effort to abstract the biblical ethnic categories. It argues that the discursive formation that would later characterize the rabbinic goy cannot be found in any of the texts written before Paul’s letters. The goal of the chapter is twofold: first, to analyze the conceptual configurations through which the distinctions between Jews and their others were articulated in texts and compositions in which the concept of the goy is not yet the organizing principle. Second, to reconstruct discursive options that existed before the formation of the goy consolidated, and that disappeared after it took hold.

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Rabbinic literature contains various discussions of reliability and suspicion in social relations as part of a sustained legal attempt at regulating these relations. In this paper, I analyze the concepts of “suspicion” and “trust” as they appear in the Mishnah, the earliest legal code of rabbinic Judaism. Through minute reading of several units from tractate Demai—which discusses the status of produce from which tithes may or may not have been taken—we will see that the Mihsnaic conceptualization is not a matter of interpersonal, subjective relationship, as we are used to think about trust, but rather of social policy, and is therefore subject to generalized rules.

We study 1,410 mandatory jurisdiction and 48 discretionary jurisdiction criminal law case outcomes in cases appealed to the Israel Supreme Court in 2006 and 2007 to assess influences on case outcomes. A methodological innovation is accounting for factors—case specialization, seniority, and workload—that modify random case assignment. To the extent one accounts for nonrandom assignment, one can infer that case outcome differences are judge effects. In mandatory jurisdiction cases, individual justices cast 3,986 votes and differed by as much as 15 percent in the probability of casting a vote favoring defendants. Female justices were about 2 to 3 percent more likely than male justices to vote for defendants but this effect is sensitive to including one justice. Defendant gender was associated with outcome, with female defendants about 17 percent more likely than male defendants to receive a favorable vote on appeal. Our data’s samples of mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases allow us to show that studies limited to discretionary jurisdiction case outcomes can distort perceptions of judges’ preferences. Justices’ ordinal rank in rate of voting for defendants or the state was uncorrelated across mandatory and discretionary jurisdiction cases. For example, the justice who sat on the most criminal cases was the fourth (of 16 justices) most favorable to the state in mandatory jurisdiction cases but the 12th most favorable in discretionary jurisdiction cases. This result casts doubt on some inferences based on studies of judges on discretionary jurisdiction courts, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, in which only discretionary case outcomes are observed.

The world of regulation, in general, and that of environmental regulation, in particular, has undergone major transformation over the last four decades. From the traditional state-centered “command and control” (C&C) regulation of the 1970s to market-based instruments (still marshaled by states) that characterized the turn of the century and then to the various types of new governance mechanisms that are in vogue today.1 The novel approaches to governance – referred to in the literature as new governance, regulatory capitalism or soft law – which are based on legally non-enforceable norms, authored, controlled and monitored by various state, quasi-state and non-state actors, have emerged as a result of both a shift in the way norms are produced and a widespread discontent with the efficacy of conventional models of regulation. The grand failures of international climate change negotiations, which are rooted in deep structural discrepancies among nations rather than ad-hoc disagreements, require a fresh and innovative thinking that would pave the way to overcoming traditional state politics and facilitate progress on the climate change front. One option that should be explored is the new governance schemes that have evolved over the last two decades. This article seeks to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of the regulatory tools embedded in the notion of new governance and explore their implications on climate change regulation. Part II of the article discusses the many facets of the notion of regulation. It argues that the study of regulation, and particularly that of climate change governance, should go beyond traditional state or even transnational regulation to encompass hybrid regulatory forms which blur the distinction between the public and the private and destabilize the boundaries between the global, the national and Climate Change Governance: Mapping the Terrain 234 CCLR 2|2011

Rabbinic literature contains several examples of a manner of silencing impious arguments that is usually identified only with later forms of piety, namely, ascribing the arguments to the evil inclination (yetzerhara). Arguments attributed to the yetzer represent serious discursive threats against rabbinic doctrine, marking fundamental problems in both its legal and nonlegal (aggadic) parts. Identifying a question or refutation as belonging to the yetzer automatically invalidates it. By ascribing arguments to the yetzer, the rabbis prevent their audience from actually engaging them, thus marking the limits of rabbinic dialogism.

The appearance in recent years of an impressive series of books, articles, and mainly dissertations on various aspects of the Mishnah collectively signifies something greater than the sum of its parts. These works herald the emergence of a new wave of Mishnah research. While differing significantly in their themes and methods, all the works discussed here share some basic methodological assumptions that are not shared by more “traditional” studies. Among these are a holistic attitude to the Mishnah as a composition; interest in questions of variegation of genre and style (narratives, rituals, lists, etc.); sensitivity to literary devices and techniques; and the use of new interpretive paradigms from rhetoric, cultural, and performative studies.

The scholarly consensus on the Rabbinic concept of the yetzer (inclination) takes for granted the existence of two yetzarim, good and evil, in every person. Some have noticed the marginality of the good yetzer in rabbinic discourse, as well as the fact that most sources discuss only one yetzer, but ascribed it to the inherent imbalance of power between the two yetzarim. In this paper I wish to rethink this scholarly consensus, while taking the single-yetzer model, which appears in almost all rabbinic sources, seriously. A systematic analysis of all rabbinic references to the yetzer, which attempts to distinguish as much as possible between sources, both chronologically (early or late), and geographically (Palestinian or Babylonian), yields a picture markedly different from the common view, and helps locate the (rather marginal) place of the two yetzarim in context of the rabbinic corpus in its entirety.

Reading is a complex cognitive process, errors in which may assume diverse forms. In this study, introducing a novel approach, we use two families of probabilistic graphical models to analyze patterns of reading errors made by dyslexic people: an LDA-based model and two Naeve Bayes models which differ by their assumptions about the generation process of reading errors. The models are trained on a large corpus of reading errors. Results show that a Naeve Bayes model achieves highest accuracy compared to labels given by clinicians (AUC = 0.801 ± 0.05), thus providing the first automated and objective diagnosis tool for dyslexia which is solely based on reading errors data. Results also show that the LDA-based model best captures patterns of reading errors and could therefore contribute to the understanding of dyslexia and to future improvement of the diagnostic procedure. Finally, we draw on our results to shed light on a theoretical debate about the definition and heterogeneity of dyslexia. Our results support a model assuming multiple dyslexia subtypes, that of a heterogeneous view of dyslexia.

New modes of environmental regulation are said to have transcended the public/private divide. These new regulatory schemes - referred to as non-coercive orderings, self-regulation, co-regulation, metaregulation and social regulation - set aside the formal nature of the regulating entity, the regulated entity, and the tools of regulation. Instead of asking whether the means, objects and formulators of the regulation are public or private, the focus lies on the substance and effectiveness of the regulation in mitigating environmental harms. In this Article we argue that despite these claims, often advanced by new governance proponents, the public/private divide in in fact alive and well, informing and impacting the ways in which various regulatory schemes are justified and legitimated. We exemplify this argument through an analysis of the role of three entities in international environmental regulation: the state (and its perception as sovereign), local governments, and civil society entities (both NGOs and business corporations). This Article then suggests three consequences of the persistence of the public/private dichotomy and its denial: it produces a “tilt” towards the private; it tends to hide conflicts and disagreements, projecting an image of a frictionless world; and it prevents an imagination of a different world that transcends the structure of social life embedded in it.

Unlike the English rule governing court fees and costs, under which the loser pays litigation costs, and the American rule, under which each party pays its own costs, Israel vests in judges full discretion to assess fees and costs. Given concerns about both the English and American rules, and the absence of empirical information about how either functions, an empirical study of judicial fee award practices should be of general interest. We report evidence that Israeli judges apply multiple de facto fee systems: a nearly one way fee-shifting system that dominates in tort cases, a loser pays system that operates when publicly owned corporations litigate, and a loser pays system with discretion to deny fees in other cases. Although a loser pays norm dominates in Israel, with fees awarded in 80% of cases, Israeli judges often exercised their discretion to protect losing litigants, especially individuals, by denying fees. For individual plaintiffs and defendants, the denial rate exceeded 30% for defendants who prevailed against individuals and was about one-quarter for plaintiffs who prevailed against individuals. Judges protected individual plaintiffs against fee awards more than corporations. In cases lost by individual plaintiffs, fees were denied to successful defendants 29.9% of the time compared to denials in 18.0% of cases lost by corporate plaintiffs and 16.7% of cases lost by governmental plaintiffs. In cases lost by individual defendants, fees were denied to successful plaintiffs 22.7% of the time compared to 9.8% denials in cases lost by corporate defendants and 28.6% denials in cases lost by government defendants. In addition to varying by whether plaintiffs or defendants prevailed and by party status, the fee denial pattern varied by case category and judicial district. Theorizing about optimal fee rules should account for the variety of fee outcomes observed in practice.

Attorney fees fund litigation yet little is known about fees in most cases. Fee data are rarely available in the United States or in English rule, loser pays, jurisdictions. This Article analyzes fee awards in Israel, which vests judges with discretion to award fees, with loser pays operating as a norm. The 2641 cases studied constitute nearly all cases terminated by judgment in district courts in 2005, 2006, 2011, and 2012. Given many fee denials, and fees when awarded being well below client payments to attorneys, the fee system could reasonably be characterized as being more American than English. Fees were awarded to prevailing parties in 72.8 percent of cases. Judges often exercised their discretion to protect losing litigants, especially individuals, from having to pay fees. In tort cases won by individuals against corporate defendants, corporations paid their own fees plus plaintiffs’ fees in 99 percent of the cases; corporate defendants that prevailed in such cases paid their own fees 48 percent of the time. Asymmetry between plaintiffs and defendants existed. In cases with fee awards, the mean and median fee paid to prevailing plaintiffs was 110,000 shekels (NIS) and 31,000 NIS, respectively; the mean and median fee paid to prevailing defendants was 49,000 NIS and 25,000 NIS, respectively. Plaintiffs prevailed in 54.8 of cases between individuals but received 90 percent of the fees. Expected award amounts varied by case category and party status. Fees were significantly correlated with damages recoveries in plaintiff victories and with time on the docket. In contract and property cases, but not in tort cases, fees declined as a percent of recovery as the recovery increased.

Combining philological, anthropological and cultural tools, this study sheds new light on issues of rabbinic gender economy and sexual morality, and contributes to the nascent scholarship on the formation of the temple in the Mishnah.

Claims of judicial bias are easy to make, but studies supporting such claims often use flawed methodology. Claims may be based on incomplete samples of a judge’s work or fail to account for the case assignment process’ influence on the merits of the judges’ cases. This Article explores the relation between perceptions of bias and the underlying reality of judicial behavior. It reports the results of a survey of the Israeli legal community’s perceptions of Israel Supreme Court justices’ preferences in criminal cases and compares the survey results with justices’ actual votes in two years of criminal cases. Justices’ actual voting patterns in mandatory jurisdiction criminal cases are not correlated with pro-state or pro-defendant perceptions of them. Justices’ votes in the much smaller pool of discretionary jurisdiction cases are more consistent with perceptions of justices’ positions than are their votes in mandatory cases. Media reports of justices as pro-state or pro-defendant also correlate reasonably well with perceptions of justices. Perceptions of justices’ tendencies vary significantly across subgroups of the legal community with some evidence suggesting that both state and defense attorneys tend to view justices as hostile to their clients’ positions. Our findings suggest that a legal community’s perceptions of highly visible judges on a country’s highest court, can substantially differ from judges’ actual behavior in the mass of cases.

Combining philological, anthropological and cultural tools, this study sheds new light on issues of rabbinic gender economy and sexual morality, and contributes to the nascent scholarship on the formation of the temple in the Mishnah.

The hermeneutics of Philo and the Rabbis differ on various fundamental issues, most notably Philo's dualistic assumptions about the hidden, spiritual meaning of the biblical text, which are not shared by the Rabbis. However, there are also significant similarities. These are not limited to shared themes and legal traditions, but encompass interpretive methods and tools, such as the citation of multiple interpretations and lumping together disconnected verses to reach the desired exegesis; as well as several specific techniques, etymologies, analogies and syllogisms. Biblical redundancies are a major issue in midrash, even in places where no ideological or thematic problems are apparent. The chapter suggests the reflectivity embedded in the midrashic praxis itself. As an example of self-reflectivity, it examines one midrashic term, kishmu'o , which the chapter claims is self-reflective by nature. The term kishmu'o occurs only where the biblical word is considered sufficiently self-explanatory. Keywords:Hermeneutic reflectivity; kishmu'o ; midrash; Philo; Rabbis

Prior studies of 1410 mandatory jurisdiction and 48 discretionary jurisdiction criminal law case outcomes in cases decided by the Israel Supreme Court in 2006 and 2007 have shown differences in the rates at which individual justices vote for the state or for defendants. They have also provided evidence of a mismatch between justices’ voting patterns in this mass of criminal cases and the legal community’s perceptions about justices’ voting behavior. A panel’s presiding justice and the justice who writes a case’s opinion may influence other justices’ votes, which would make raw votes noisy signals of justices’ true preferences. This paper explores the relation between voting patterns and the justices who preside and who write opinions in a case. We compare justices’ voting patterns in cases in which they preside and write opinions with their voting patterns in cases in which they do not preside or write opinions. We also compare the voting patterns of non-presiding, non-opinion-writing justices in cases in which a justice does and does not preside or write the opinion. With one exception, we find no significant difference in justices’ voting patterns across presiding and non-presiding status. For some justices, their own voting patterns and the non-opinion justices’ voting patterns differ in cases in which a justice writes the opinion and cases in which the justice does not sit. This is likely due to the nonrandom process of opinion assignment. Overall, we find little evidence that the institutional features, presiding justice and opinion justice status, mask the true preferences of justices. The paper then assesses whether perceptions of justices are better explained by their behavior in cases in which they write opinions than by their votes in the mass of cases. Perceptions of at least one justice may be better explained by cases in which she wrote opinions than by her votes in the mass of cases.

Combining philological, anthropological and cultural tools, this study sheds new light on issues of rabbinic gender economy and sexual morality, and contributes to the nascent scholarship on the formation of the temple in the Mishnah.

Combining philological, anthropological and cultural tools, this study sheds new light on issues of rabbinic gender economy and sexual morality, and contributes to the nascent scholarship on the formation of the temple in the Mishnah.

The Israeli law governing cost and fee allocation diverges greatly from almost all other legal systems in the Western world (with the exception of South Africa) in that cost allocation is left entirely in the discretion of the court. Although in practice judges usually follow the “loser pays rule”, (Uri Goren, Civil Procedure Issues (Tenth Edition, 2009) 744.) this is not mandated by law and judges can, and sometime do, diverge from it, ordering the winning party to pay the losing party’s litigation costs. In terms of the amounts awarded, some rhetorical transformation has taken place. Historically, courts tended to disregard the actual amounts expended by winning parties on the litigation when awarding costs, leading to their substantial under-compensation. In recent years, following the “constitutional revolution” which also constitutionalized civil procedure, those both within and outside of the judicial system have increasingly argued that litigation costs should be more in line with actual costs. But the extent to which the rhetorical transformation will infiltrate actual reality remains to be seen. In what follows we provide some information and insights concerning the rules and decisions regulating the allocation of trial costs and reflect on their impact on access to justice as well as on the behavior of the parties to the litigation.

This article evaluates 3,344 appeals to the Israel Supreme Court (ISC) to assess case selection, case outcomes, and rates of dissent and concurrence, with an emphasis on the behavior of individual justices. We show that analyses of judicial activity, and of individual justices’ behavior, in courts with discretionary jurisdiction should account for the court’s case selection process. This finding has implications for studies of all courts with discretionary appellate jurisdiction and for studies of individual judicial behavior. ISC assignment of cases for preliminary screening by individual justices has a substantial non-random component. Over 95% of the discretionary jurisdiction criminal cases were screened by two justices, who significantly differed in the rate at which they referred cases to 3 judge screening panels. Screening outcomes also varied significantly in discretionary civil cases. The rate of granting review was highest in tort cases. The rate of granting review was substantially higher in cases involving female defendants than in cases involving male defendants. With respect to outcomes in cases reaching the merits, the high rate of reversal in discretionary jurisdiction cases is not a consequence of one or two justices’ behavior; granting review of cases to reverse them is an ISC-wide practice. Regardless of the initial screening justice, the reversal rate in discretionary cases, civil or criminal, was well above the 24% to 32% reversal rate in mandatory jurisdiction cases. Dissent rates were low, less than 2% overall and only 3% in discretionary jurisdiction cases. Rates of concurrence with an opinion by an individual justice were substantially higher.

This chapter attempts to decipher the different ways in which time is conceived, narrated and constructed in Mekilta Shirata . It begins with a simple question: what allows the homilist to join the biblical victory song? The question becomes more disturbing in light of the past/future model which prevails in this tractate. It considers the possibility of two rival models: "succession" vs. "sandwich" and shows that there is no real contradiction between the two. Through a close reading of one homily author suggests that the homiletical activity itself as the mechanism that allows the homilist to transcend the past/future model and join himself the biblical hymn. The chapter can be seen as an exercise in comparative methodology to tannaitic midrash. A hermeneutical-rhetorical analysis, concentrating on the midrashic process itself, reveals the mechanism that enables the very act of joining the biblical song wholeheartedly. Keywords: biblical victory song; homilist; Mekilta Shirata ; one homily; revelation; tannaitic midrash

The principles of the law of succession of the State of Israel are assembled in the Succession Law, 1965. This statute, consisting of eight chapters and 161 sections, constitutes a first attempt at codification of Israeli civil law. The statute was intended to end the recourse to the conglomeration of laws previously applied to a person's succession. We would emphasize in this context the provision of sec. 150 of the statute, which states: “In matters of succession, Article 46 of the Palestine Order-in-Council, 1922–47, shall not apply”.

Appellate adjudication frequently involves small group decision making. Role responsibility theory and experimental evidence suggest that high status group members may disproportionately influence other members. A judicial panel’s presiding justice and the justice who writes a case’s opinion thus may influence other justices’ votes. We compare justices’ voting patterns in cases in which they presided and wrote opinions with their voting patterns when they did not preside or write opinions. The data consist of 1,410 mandatory jurisdiction criminal law cases decided by the Israel Supreme Court in 2006 and 2007. Voting patterns varied significantly with presiding and nonpresiding status. On average justices were 4.5% more likely to vote in their preferred direction when presiding than as mere panel members, which corresponds to an increase of about 28% given a baseline rate of voting for defendants of 16%. Justices’ colleagues’ voting patterns significantly changed when particular justices did and did not preside. Colleagues were 50% more likely to vote for defendants when one justice did not preside compared with when he did. Some justices’ voting patterns varied based on opinion-writing status. This is likely due to the nonrandom process of opinion assignment.