So Long, Israel (Part I)

I just returned today from my extended visit to Israel,
where I spent the month of December sightseeing,
conferencing,
teaching,
presenting papers (here
and here),
and meeting new friends.  I was
lucky during this trip to have a chance to meet faculty from Tel Aviv, Hebrew, and Bar-Ilan,
but spent most of the time at Haifa, and am happy to
say that I got to know almost the entire faculty there at least a little bit.

Aside from the beautiful location in the Carmel forest
overlooking the Mediterranean, Haifa is a great place to be because the faculty
is astonishingly smart, welcoming, and engaged.  I feel certain that I’ve made life-long friends there.

I can’t do justice to all the people I met and the fun
things that I did and saw there, but wanted to review a few of the highlights
in my goodbye post.  Avishalom
Tor, whom I’ve known since he was an S.J.D. student at Harvard (yikes, I’m
old!)  was kind enough to set up
this visit, organized a fabulous conference at the beginning of the trip, and
basically looked after me the whole time I was there. 

Avishalom’s research uses a behavioral and experimental
approach to study competitive behavior generally and its legal regulation in
market settings specifically.  His work
has been published in legal, decision-making, psychological, and economic
journals, such as the Michigan Law Review, Antitrust Law Journal, Journal of
Behavioral Decision Making, Psychological Science, and the Journal of
Institutional and Theoretical Economics. You can read the coverage of his research
on The
N-Effect: More Competitors, Less Competition (with Stephen M. Garcia, University of
Michigan – Ross School of Business) in the Boston
Globe and the Economist
(subscription required).  Avishalom
is also the Secretary of the European Association of Law and Economics (EALE).  

One of Avishalom’s many collaborators is fellow Haifa
faculty member Oren
Gazal-Ayal.  I spent several
lunches (and a wonderful dinner on my last night in Haifa) talking to Oren
about his various projects, all of which are fascinating.  They range from testifying before the
Israeli legislature on sentencing guidelines, comparing the incentives of
Israeli academics to their U.S. counterparts, analyzing the impact of defendant
characteristics on criminal sentences, and researching the influence of
innocence on plea bargaining, among others.  See Oren’s faculty
publication page or his SSRN page
to download these and other articles.

One of the highlights of the trip involved fellow Haifa visitor
NYU’s
Rochelle Dreyfuss and her spouse, Robert, with whom we spent a great, but
rainy, day sightseeing in the ancient port city of Caesarea.  The top photo above shows Caesarea on a
beautiful sunny day.  We took the
lower one with our iphone during a break in the rain. 

The trip to Caesarea was followed by dinner at the home of
Haifa’s amazing new dean, Niva
Elkin-Koren.  U.S. readers in
IP probably already know Elkin-Koren’s work, which
is extensive.  Elkin-Koren is
also a Global
Visiting Professor of Law at NYU. It must be hard for someone so academically inclined to take on administrative duties, but Haifa faculty seem to take great pride in their institution and the collaborative way in which it is managed.  Everyone seems to pitch in, in terms of committee and other service, and Niva strikes me as a good example of that.

I’m jet-lagged and need a nap, so I’ll quit there for
now.  Tomorrow, I’ll conclude this “farewell
to Israel” post.

Related Post: So Long, Israel (Part II)