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Triggered by the COVID-19 crisis, Israel’s Ministry of Health (MoH) held a virtual datathon based on deidentified governmental data. Organized by a multidisciplinary committee, Israel’s research community was invited to offer insights to help solve COVID-19 policy challenges. The Datathon was designed to develop operationalizable data-driven models to address COVID-19 health policy challenges. Specific relevant challenges were defined and diverse, reliable, up-to-date, deidentified governmental datasets were extracted and tested. Secure remote-access research environments were established. Registration was open to all citizens. Around a third of the applicants were accepted, and they were teamed to balance areas of expertise and represent all sectors of the community. Anonymous surveys for participants and mentors were distributed to assess usefulness and points for improvement and retention for future datathons. The Datathon included 18 multidisciplinary teams, mentored by 20 data scientists, 6 epidemiologists, 5 presentation mentors, and 12 judges. The insights developed by the three winning teams are currently considered by the MoH as potential data science methods relevant for national policies. Based on participants’ feedback, the process for future data-driven regulatory responses for health crises was improved. Participants expressed increased trust in the MoH and readiness to work with the government on these or future projects.

The aim of evaluating a regulatory system is to enable governments to improve the ways in which they function, regulate, and prioritize attention and resources to the system as a whole. Academic and professional literatures provide useful principles with which to proceed. However, off-the-shelf methods for assessing regulatory systems with generic characteristics are scarce. The Regulatory System Scan and Assessment methodology was designed for this purpose and applied to the current regulatory framework that governs Israel’s actions to plan—mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover—from the damage which may be caused by a severe earthquake. Although there is oftentimes widespread agreement concerning the existence of problems in a regulatory system, there is rarely consensus or a thorough understanding of what those problems are. Only when problems are identified can policy makers create viable and effective solutions. Development of the Regulatory System Scan and Assessment is a step toward addressing this challenge.

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. lsi_1209 919..956

This paper suggests that Canadian common law doctrine, according to which businesses providing goods and services to the public at large are allowed to refuse service because of a customer’s group-based characteristics such as race, is inconsistent with previous case law as well as with the underlying reason-based structure of the common law. After suggesting that the common law has not been fully displaced by human rights legislation, the paper demonstrates that the common law contains three concrete articulations of a duty to provide equal service. It argues that at the core of the rationale that best fits these bodies of case law is a status-based demand placed on those interacting in their capacity as members of an impersonal profession to refrain from taking into account any personal or group-based characteristics beyond those relevant to the provision of goods and services around which the profession is organized.

This chapter considers the question of whether satire that ridicules a religious figure or the core tenets of a religious belief should receive different constitutional protection than that afforded to political satire. It examines two possible models that seek to resolve the tension in principle: the U.S. model, under which freedom of speech enjoys pre-eminence; and the Israeli model, that protects human dignity as the principal value. In outlining the Israeli approach, the chapter analyzes an Israeli case that led to the first criminal conviction for the violation of an act prohibiting the publication of material calculated to outrage religious sentiments. It then addresses some normative and institutional features that separate the U.S. and the Israeli approaches. Moving beyond comparative legal analysis, the chapter puts forward the hypothesis that the source of the difference in jurisprudence arises at least in part out of a different cultural perception regarding the core meaning of ‘speech’ or ‘expression’s in these two jurisdictions. Drawing upon this cultural understanding, it is suggested that perhaps it is passion, not merely reason, that organizes the realm of public discourse. The chapter concludes with a brief comment on the possible limits of relying on foreign sources in some (passion-based) cases.