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New technologies have always challenged the social, economic, legal, and ideological status quo. Constitutional law is no less impacted by such technologically driven transformations, as the state must formulate a legal response to new technologies and their market applications, as well as the state’s own use of new technology. In particular, the development of data collection, data mining, and algorithmic analysis by public and private actors present unique challenges to public law at the doctrinal as well as the theoretical level. This collection, aimed at legal scholars and practitioners, describes the constitutional challenges created by the algorithmic society. It offers an important synthesis of the state of play in law and technology studies, addressing the challenges for fundamental rights and democracy, the role of policy and regulation, and the responsibilities of private actors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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 Jordan Rift Valley is a high-risk low-occurrence zone for earthquakes, with documented incidences within the last millennium causing widespread destruction. This research examines the implications of the immediate risks for earthquake readiness. Due to data availability, we focus on Israel’s readiness for earthquakes and compare our findings with a cursory review of readiness in the proximate countries. Readiness refers to mitigation and preparedness (before), response (during) and recovery (after). The immediate and palpable threats in the region are wars and terrorism, and our hypothesis is that governance culture in this volatile region is geared toward capacities and expertise which have been developed to address national security threats, characterized by emphasis on quick response. We expect to see a bias toward immediate response with regard to earthquake readiness as well, with attention also paid to preparedness. Accordingly, we hypothesize that other aspects of readiness, such as retrofitting of buildings and infrastructure in the mitigation category, lag behind in countries surrounding the Jordan Rift. To test this, we develop and apply a regulatory system scan and assessment methodology to the Israeli case. The methodology includes structured mapping and evaluation of the relevant regulatory system as well as actual policy outputs. The process includes inputs from policy makers, experts, and stakeholders. Findings show that the country’s earthquake readiness regime is indeed heavily biased toward immediate response which is continually advancing and improving, managed by security-related bodies. In contrast, mitigation efforts are deficient and little is being done to improve the situation. A survey of readiness efforts of other countries along the Jordan Rift points to a similar situation.

In the realm of new localism and collaboration, local educational policymakers are called upon for responsible community leadership. Given the conceptual continuum between new localism and transformational leadership, this study examines the relationship between the leadership style of local educational policymakers and the involvement of local authorities in education. Data were obtained from 107 questionnaires submitted by mayors and directors of education affiliated with 100 local authorities in Israel. As predicted, there was a positive relationship between transformational leadership and the local authorities&rsquo, involvement in education, measured using four factors, but only for sound local authorities. We used five criteria to determine the soundness of the local authorities. In contrast, among less sound local authorities, there was an inverse relationship between transformational leadership and involvement in education. In general, in such communities, leaders seemed to prefer to leave educational issues to the central government. Thus, we present evidence for the boundaries of educational transformational leadership in the educational governance arena. Education-related policies are on the agenda of leaders even in weaker local authorities, but only to the extent that these policies can serve as an instrument to meet specific needs of the local community. All in all, there is no &ldquo, one size fits all&rdquo, for all aspects of new localism&mdash, i.e., central regulation towards local government, local policy, local leadership, and civic participation. Accordingly, policymakers, local leaders and residents must fit themselves to the blurred boundaries of new localism and collaborate towards better education. Implications of the findings are discussed.

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.

The chapter explores the role of law in society and its relation to ethical conflicts as reflected through the prism of the film The Third Man. By focusing on the complexities of life in post-war Vienna, the film exposes dilemmas that prevail in ordinary times and in functioning democracies as well. Our analysis suggests that one way to manage these dilemmas and balance the conflicting loyalties and interests they raise is to sustain open channels between the law and other narrative-generating practices from which normative stances are evaluated. The law-and-cinema discourse is one such channel and The Third Man presents, in our eyes, the vitality of that channel, due to its rich aesthetical language and its unique representation of the ethical tensions (and their consequences) in the modern era.

With the exception of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (link below) no reproduction of any part of this work may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. New technologies have always challenged the social, economic, legal, and ideological status quo. Constitutional law is no less impacted by such technologically driven transformations, as the state must formulate a legal response to new technologies and their market applications, as well as the state's own use of new technology. In particular, the development of data collection, data mining, and algorithmic analysis by public and private actors present unique challenges to public law at the doctrinal as well as the theoretical level. This collection, aimed at legal scholars and practitioners, describes the constitutional challenges created by the algorithmic society. It offers an important synthesis of the state of play in law and technology studies, addressing the challenges for fundamental rights and democracy, the role of policy and regulation, and the responsibilities of private actors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. -- Oreste Pollicino and Giovanni De Gregorio, Constitutional law in the algorithmic society -- Andrea Simoncini and Erik Longo, Fundamental rights and the rule of law in the algorithmic society by law? -- Celine Castest-Renard, Human rights and algorithmic impact assessment for predictive policing -- Francesca Galli, Law enforcement and data-driven predictions at the national and EU level : a challenge to the presumption of innocence and reasonable suspicion? -- Amnon Reichman and Giovanni Sartor, Algorithms and regulation -- Angela Daly, Thilo Hagendorff, Li Hui, Monique Mann, Vidushi Marda, Ben Wagner, Wayne Wei Wang, Artificial Intelligence, governance and ethics : global perspectives -- Pieter Vancleynenbreugel, EU by-design regulation in the algorithmic society : promising way forward or constitutional nightmare in-the-making? -- Henrik Palmer Olsen, Jacob Livingston Slosser and Thomas Troels Hildebrandt, What's in the box? The legal requirement of explainability in computationally, eided decision-making in public ddministration -- Yaiza Cabedo, The international regulatory race for protecting investors from crypto-finance risks -- Hans W. Micklitz and Anne Aurelie Villanueva, Responsibilities of companies in the algorithmic society -- Serge Gijrath, Consumer law as a tool to regulate adverse consequences of AI output -- Federica Casarosa, When the algorithm is not fully reliable : the collaboration between technology and humans in the fight against hate speech -- Pietro Sirena and Francesco Paolo Patti, Smart contracts and automation of private relationships