What solutions can we find in the research literature for preventing sexual violence, and what psychological theories have guided these efforts? We gather all primary prevention efforts to reduce sexual violence from 1985 to 2018 and provide a bird’s-eye view of the literature. We first review predominant theoretical approaches to sexual-violence perpetration prevention by highlighting three interventions that exemplify the zeitgeist of primary prevention efforts at various points during this time period. We find a throughline in primary prevention interventions: They (...) aim to change attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge (i.e., ideas) to reduce sexual-violence perpetration and victimization. Our meta-analysis of these studies tests the efficacy of this approach directly and finds that although many interventions are successful at changing ideas, behavior change does not follow. There is little to no relationship between changing attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge and reducing victimization or perpetration. We also observe trends over time, including a shift from targeting a reduction in perpetration to targeting an increase in bystander intervention. We conclude by highlighting promising new strategies for measuring victimization and perpetration and calling for interventions that are informed by theories of behavior change and that center sexually violent behavior as the key outcome of interest. (shrink)

Birkhahn discusses children’s rights with 1st grade students through cultural perspectives. Playing or studying in adolescent years serves as a significant role in this discussion.

A student written poem, alongside responses from 2nd and 6th graders on the poem's philosophy.

Archaeology is a practice concerning time. Layer upon layer of earth condenses to become the ground on which generation after generation lives and dies. Human remains are among the many objects that fill the soil, and some of them get 'discovered', exhumed, researched and displayed by archaeologists across the world. For the edited volume, Archaeologists and the Dead, editors Howard Williams and Melanie Giles convened a collection of authors who take seriously the scientific, metaphoric, historical and political implications of the (...) work of digging. (shrink)

According to Bastin et al.’s integrative memory model, familiarity may be attributed to both entity representations and relational representations. However, the model does not specify what triggers familiarity for relational representations. I argue that fluency is a key player in the attribution of familiarity regardless of the type of representation. Two lines of evidence are reviewed in support of my claim.

ABSTRACTA careful look at societies facing threat reveals a unique phenomenon in which liberals and conservatives react emotionally and attitudinally in a similar manner, rallying around the conservative flag. Previous research suggests that this rally effect is the result of liberals shifting in their attitudes and emotional responses toward the conservative end. Whereas theories of motivated social cognition provide a motivation-based account of cognitive processes, it remains unclear whether emotional shifts are, in fact, also a motivation-based process. Herein, we propose (...) that under threat, liberals are motivated to feel existential concern about their group’s future vitality to the same extent as conservatives, because this group-based emotion elicits support for ingroup protective action. Within the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we tested and found support for this hypothesis both inside and outside the laboratory. We d... (shrink)

We introduce a hitherto overlooked phenomenon in the cognitive and psycholinguistic study of metaphors that we termed imposed metaphoricity. We propose that a metaphorical reading can be imposed on a given expression regardless of its semantic content. We suggest that there is a class of constructions that impose metaphorical interpretation. We present findings from three experiments and from corpus-based analyses that support our proposal. Experiments 1–2 compared interpretations of expressions that can have both a literal and a metaphorical meaning when (...) embedded in a standard metaphorical form and in a form that imposes metaphoricity. In Experiment 3 we examine reaction time to such forms in an attempt to identify interference of form with early metaphorical processing. Two corpus-based analyses characterize the use of these two metaphorical constructions in natural language. We discuss the independence of metaphoricity from semantics, as demonstrated by forms that impose metaphorical interpretations. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 24, Issue 2, pp 224 - 278 This article discusses the anonymous early kabbalistic work _Sefer Maʿayan ha-Ḥokhmah_, one of the pivotal works of ʿIyyun literature. The first part deals with the book’s historical and literary aspects. The second part interprets a specific formulation in light of the basic ideas of the book itself, presenting the twofold pattern as a mystical type and as a grounding for linguistic-theological theory. The third part discusses the term “positive theology” in (...) the theosophical and religious dimension, from the phenomenological perspective of extrovertive mysticism, and as a linguistic structure that provides the layer of signs as a stable basis for the restrained progress of Tongue. Acquiring the source as hidden but attendant by its constant grounding as a part of linguistic progression, uses the bifocal sight of binary extrovertive mysticism to denote the twofold structure of each being and each part of speech. (shrink)

In standard economic models, two basic assumptions are made: the first, that actors are rational, and the second, that actors’ preferences are a given and exogenously determined. Behavioral economics — followed by behavioral law and economics — has questioned the first assumption. This Article challenges the second one, arguing that in many instances, social welfare should be enhanced not by maximizing satisfaction of existing preferences but by changing the preferences themselves. The Article identifies seven categories of cases where the traditional (...) objections to intentional preference change by the state and the law lose force and argues that in these cases, such a change warrants serious consideration. It then proposes four different modes of intervention in people’s preferences, varying in intensity, on the one hand, and in the identity of their addressees, on the other, and explains the relative advantages and disadvantages of each form of intervention. (shrink)

People living in areas of intractable conflicts experience extreme negative emotions which ultimately lead to support of aggressive policies. Emotion regulation and particularly cognitive reapprais...

Holtby, Allen and Fairchild are both recent and revolutionary decisions that address an important aspect of the indeterminate causation problem that frequently arises in tort litigation. In Holtby and Allen, the Court of Appeal departed from the traditional binary approach, under which a tort claimant either recovers compensation for his or her entire injury or is altogether denied recovery—depending on whether his or her case against the defendant is more probable than not. Holtby and Allen substituted this approach by the (...) proportionate recovery principle, under which the defendant compensates the claimant for a fraction of his or her injury that represents the defendant's statistical share in that injury. This article analyses this development within the particular domain of indeterminate causation, over which the proportionate recovery principle has been licensed to exercise control. The article claims that this development would constitute an improvement of the law from the perspectives of both optimal deterrence and corrective justice, if the courts properly formulate its scope. First, the proportionate recovery principle needs to be explicitly confined to cases that deal with recurrent wrongs. Second, determination of the defendant's share in the claimant's injury ought to be grounded on the probability of causation, rather than the risk of inflicting that injury. Third, judges must not apply unarticulated intuitions in determining the magnitude of the relevant risk or probability: their decisions in that area would be better informed by the statistical principle of ‘insufficient reason’, also known as the ‘indifference principle’. Fourth, courts are yet to relieve the doctrinal tension between the proportionate recovery principle, as recognized in Holtby and Allen, and the previous rejection of that principle by the House of Lords. Subsequently, the article analyses the House of Lords' decision in Fairchild—yet another instance of indeterminate causation in which proportionate recovery is preferable to the ‘all or nothing’ approach. In this case, the House of Lords allowed the claimants full recovery. This holding was grounded in the Law Lords' innovative approach to indeterminate causation, and the article unfolds the problematics of this approach. Finally, the article offers an adoption of yet another legal mechanism—the ‘evidential damage doctrine’—that replaces liability under uncertainty with liability for uncertainty. (shrink)

Lawmakers regularly delegate authority to agents. Such delegation is accompanied by mechanisms that attempt to ensure that the agents adhere to the will of the lawmakers. But these mechanisms are often ineffective or inefficient. Moreover, at times the very imposition of constraints distorts the agents’ incentives and impels them to adopt skewed policies. We suggest that it is possible to reduce such wasteful enforcement costs by delegating authority to certain types of agents who will pursue the lawmaker’s policies without constraints (...) imposed by the lawmaker. In this Article we focus on agents who are impartial — but not indifferent! — and skillful enough to identify the proper course of action. The Article encompasses two main arguments. The normative argument is that when skillful and impartial agents can be identified, it makes sense to delegate to them decision-making powers with only limited constraints. Moreover, in such instances it may be more cost-effective to provide agents with incentives to act impartially rather than develop enforcement mechanisms to impose impartiality. The positive argument is that the law — sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly — is compatible with our normative argument in various fields. Although our argument is general in scope and applies to many areas of law, in this Article we begin by focusing on tort law and on international law. We distinguish five categories of cases where the law relies on agents and detect in some of them impartial and skillful agents. This analysis demonstrates that, in some of these categories, the law in fact relies on agents with only minimal constraints and that, in other situations, the constraints imposed by the law are counterproductive. Our normative argument thus serves an explanatory role in understanding many legal doctrines and principles, but, at the same time, offers a critical view on other doctrines and principles, which are not compatible with that argument. (shrink)

A doctor who lapses and injures her patient, and a driver who lapses and causes an accident, are liable under negligence law for the harm done. But lapse is not necessarily negligence, since reasonable people lapse from time to time. We show that tort liability for “reasonable” lapses distorts doctors’, drivers’, and manufacturers’ incentives to take care. Furthermore, such liability provides potential injurers with incentives to substitute activities which are less prone to lapses with activities which are more prone to (...) lapses, even if such substitution is inefficient. We propose several solutions to the inefficiencies that result from liability for lapses, and argue that under certain circumstances injurers should be entitled to invoke a “lapse defense.”. (shrink)

The Jehovah’s Witnesses cases of the late 1930s and early 1940s presented some of the first instances of American Supreme Court’s attempts to grapple with the challenges of a multicultural society. Taken as a whole, these cases represented a favorable position towards minorities’ claims, even to some extent a path breaking one. The Jehovah’s Witnesses cases were a precursor of the Court’s growing involvement in the protection of minorities’ rights, which colored the entire second half of the 20th century. They (...) further introduced a new language, and new judicial forms into constitutional jurisprudence—the language of balancing and balancing tests. In all these aspects the Jehovah’s Witnesses cases seem to have shown the early sings of multicultural ideology in Supreme Court jurisprudence. However, not all Jehovah’s Witnesses cases showed the same kind of judicial willingness to protect minorities’ interests from the will of the majority, and not all involved the new judicial rhetoric of balancing. What explains these different judicial responses in cases which are similar in their facts and close to each other in time? In this Article I will attempt to distinguish between three types of Jehovah’s Witnesses cases and argue that the different judicial responses in each of them indicates a different structure of the multicultural conflict, and a different structure of the multicultural claims in each of them. (shrink)

The Israeli Supreme Court has become increasingly polarized between liberal and conservative judges. This phenomenon is relatively new to the Israeli Supreme Court and follows the much older and more well-known example of the U.S. Supreme Court. This article surveys both U.S. and Israeli court polarization and shows the history, reasons, and special features of polarization of both courts, including the important differences between them. It also adds a distinction to existing literature on court polarization—the distinction between court polarization and (...) politicization, and especially the distinction between “regular” polarization and “one-side” polarization. Regular court polarization happens when the court is divided roughly equally between the two main political contenders. One-side polarization happens when there is a clear advantage to one side of the political map in the make-up of the court. The current U.S. Supreme Court, with six conservative justices and only three liberal justices, is an example of one-side court polarization that is tilted to the right. The current Israeli Supreme Court is an example for one-side court polarization tilted to the left; there are 10 liberal judges and only five conservative judges on the court. The article’s main argument is that one-side court polarization presents a particularly vexing problem for the legitimacy of the court, even more so than “regular” polarization. The article concludes with a survey of possible solutions to help Israel retract itself from one-side court polarization. (shrink)

The book provides a comprehensive and principled account of the uncertainty problem that arises in tort litigation. It presents and critically examines the existing doctrinal solutions of the problem, as evolved in England, the United States, Canada, and Israel, and also offers a number of original solutions, such as imposition of collective liability and liability for evidential damage. Among the issues dealt with by the book are rapidly developing areas of tort law, such as mass torts, liability for imposing risk (...) and the like. The book combines the traditional doctrinal depiction of the law with general theoretical insights that include economic analysis. (shrink)

Negligence law is built around the paradigmatic case of a person who unreasonably preferred his own interests to those of others and, as a result, caused damage to another person. However, this case is not representative of all instances of negligence. In some cases, the negligent injurer failed in balancing between the interests of the victim alone; in other cases, he failed in balancing between the victim’s interests and those of a third party; sometimes the injurer failed in balancing the (...) victim’s interests and the interests of the public or of society as a whole; and in yet other instances, he failed in balancing between his own interests. This article argues that the law should not treat in the same manner the different types of instances of failure in balancing between interests. Both justice and deterrence considerations mandate different treatment for the different types of instances, in accordance with the type of interests that the negligent injurer failed to balance. The article focuses on the typical types of balances of interests that the potential injurer is required to conduct before taking action, with the aim of determining the degree to which it is crucial to impose tort liability in each type of case. The article also examines whether prevailing negligence law is compatible with the thesis developed in the article and proposes tools for achieving such compatibility. (shrink)

An interesting feature of the language of many Daoist texts is their atypical idealization of Darkness and Obscurity, which contrasts with the positive connotations of Light and Clarity in virtually all great philosophical traditions. This article highlights a formerly unnoted difference between the received and the excavated Guodian 郭店 versions of the Laozi 老子, which reveals an interesting change in the use of Light/Darkness symbolism through the evolution of the text: while the received Laozi uses both metaphorical schemes to roughly (...) the same extent, the presumably earlier Guodian Laozi lacks almost all of the “bright” references that appear in later recensions, thus constituting a much “darker” version of the text. The article discusses the philosophical meaning of this terminological shift and the possible reasons for its occurrence, and closely analyzes three cases in which this process of “textual illumination” seems to have taken place during the transition between the Guodian and received version of the text. Alongside more specific implications such as the formerly unknown linkage between ming 明 and chang 常, a suggested stratification of chapter 55, and the possible relationship between the proto-Laozian materials and the Zhuangzi 莊子, this article also proposes a more general hypothesis according to which the absence of light metaphors in the Guodian version represents the jargon of an earlier “dark” stratum of Daoism, traces of which were preserved in some of the texts known to us today. (shrink)

To succeed in self-regulation, people need to believe that it is possible to change behaviour and they also need to use effective means to enable such a change. We propose that this also applies to emotion regulation. In two studies, we found that people were most successful in emotion regulation, the more they believed emotions can be controlled and the more they used an effective emotion regulation strategy – namely, cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive reappraisal moderated the link between beliefs about the (...) controllability of emotion and success in emotion regulation, when reappraisal was measured as a trait or manipulated. Such moderation was found when examining the regulation of disgust elicited by emotion-inducing films, and the regulation of anger elicited by real political events. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice in emotion regulation. (shrink)

The prevalence of sensationalized headlines and deceptive narratives in online content has prompted the need for effective clickbait detection methods. This study delves into the nuances of clickbait in Hebrew, scrutinizing diverse features such as linguistic and structural features, and exploring various types of clickbait in Hebrew, a language that has received relatively limited attention in this context. Utilizing a range of machine learning models, this research aims to identify linguistic features that are instrumental in accurately classifying Hebrew headlines as (...) either clickbait or non-clickbait. The findings underscore the critical role of linguistic attributes in enhancing the performance of the classification model. Notably, the employment of a machine learning model resulted in an impressive accuracy of 0.87 in clickbait detection. Moving forward, our research plan encompasses dataset expansion through the best machine learning model assisted labelling, with the objective of optimizing deep learning models for even more robust outcomes. This study not only advances clickbait detection in the realm of Hebrew but also emphasizes the fundamental importance of linguistic features in the accurate classification of clickbait. (shrink)

This article examines communication between a human being and God in the Jewish philosophy of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). The article focuses on two distinct forms of biblical communication: lyrical psalms and a godly revelation in a still small voice. It investigates Cohen’s Jewish philosophy in light of communication theories to deepen the philosophical and theoretical discussion. The article examines previously unexplored ideas in Cohen’s writings, analyzes his religious perceptions in terms of communication, and at the same time expands the concept (...) of communication. This new perspective sheds new light on Cohen’s Jewish philosophy and offers a new philosophic perception of divine-human communication. (shrink)

Proportionality in Action presents an empirical and comparative exploration of the proportionality doctrine, based on detailed accounts of the application of the framework by apex courts in six jurisdictions: Germany, Canada, South Africa, Israel, Poland and India. The analysis of each country is written and contextualized by a constitutional scholar from the relevant jurisdiction. Each country analysis draws upon a large sample of case law and employs a mixed methodological approach: an expansive coding scheme allows for quantitative analysis providing comparable (...) and quantifiable measurements, which is enriched by qualitative analysis that engages with the substance of the decisions and captures nuance, contextualizing the data and providing it with meaning. The book concludes with a comparative chapter that synthesizes some of the most interesting findings. Focusing on deviations of the practice of proportionality from theory, the authors conclude their argument in support of an integrated approach to the application of proportionality. (shrink)

Law and economics scholarship has traditionally analyzed efficient breach cases monolithically. By grouping efficient breach cases together, this literature treats the subjective motives and the distributive effects of the breach as immaterial. The Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment introduced a distinction based on the intent and the effects of the breach, allowing courts to use disgorgement remedies in cases of ‘opportunistic’ breach of contract (i.e., ‘deliberate and profitable’ breaches). In this article, we evaluate this approach, focusing on the (...) effects of disgorgement remedies on allocative and productive efficiency, information-forcing and competitive effects, and restraint of breach-searching incentives. We show that, even from a purely consequentialist perspective, disgorgement remedies may be normatively warranted, especially when involving sellers’ breach. Recent experimental evidence revealed that the preferences and reactions of ordinary people are in line with our evaluation of the effects of opportunistic breach. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

The conventional approach to law and religion assumes that these are competing domains, which raises questions about the freedom of, and from, religion; alternate commitments of religion and human rights; and respective jurisdictions of civil and religious courts. This volume moves beyond this competitive paradigm to consider law and religion as overlapping and interrelated frameworks that structure the social order, arguing that law and religion share similar properties and have a symbiotic relationship. Moreover, many legal systems exhibit religious characteristics, informing (...) their notions of authority, precedent, rituals and canonical texts, and most religions invoke legal concepts or terminology. The contributors address this blurring of law and religion in the contexts of political theology, secularism, church-state conflicts, and the foundational idea of divine law. (shrink)

The pore‐forming BCL‐2 family proteins are effectors of mitochondrial poration in apoptosis initiation. Two atypical effectors—BOK and truncated BID (tBID)—join the canonical effectors BAK and BAX. Gene knockout revealed developmental phenotypes in the absence the effectors, supporting their roles in vivo. During apoptosis effectors are activated and change shape from dormant monomers to dynamic oligomers that associate with and permeabilize mitochondria. BID is activated by proteolysis, BOK accumulates on inhibition of its degradation by the E3 ligase gp78, while BAK and (...) BAX undergo direct activation by BH3‐only initiators, autoactivation, and crossactivation. Except tBID, effector oligomers on the mitochondria appear as arcs and rings in super‐resolution microscopy images. The BH3‐in‐groove dimers of BAK and BAX, the tBID monomers, and uncharacterized BOK species are the putative building blocks of apoptotic pores. Effectors interact with lipids and bilayers but the mechanism of membrane poration remains elusive. I discuss effector‐mediated mitochondrial poration. (shrink)

Assume that a person who is suspected of either murdering X or raping Y credibly and voluntarily confesses to have committed ‘a terrible crime’ but immediately after this utterance decides to remain silent. The remaining available evidence cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt the exact offence which he committed. Should such an accused be acquitted of both offences and evade the law or should a way be found to allow a conviction, although no specific offence can be proven beyond reasonable doubt? (...) Harel and Porat suggest that such an accused should be convicted of an unspecific offence. This paper reaches entirely different conclusions, according to which the prevailing insistence of most Criminal justice systems on offence specificity is justified. It is argued that offence specificity stems from the cognitive psychological difficulties associated with simulating the event in question if the accused is convicted of an unspecific offence. The reason is that fact-finders are unable to simulate the details of an unspecific offence while retaining a confidence level sufficiently high to satisfy the standard of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The fact-finder faces a choice between a proven offence which is difficult to simulate and a group of unproven offences which are easy to simulate. These difficulties also give rise to a more solid expressivist justification for offence specificity than that conceded by Harel and Porat. Unspecific offences undermine the efficacy of condemnation because the message that corresponding convictions would broadcast to members of the public would be either blurred and ineffective or based on scenarios none of which was proven beyond reasonable doubt. This paper therefore offers two independent justifications for the prevailing insistence on offence specificity, both of which are based on the cognitive psychological difficulties of simulation, as found by the fact-finder and the public respectively. (shrink)

From the beginning of the XIV century, many leading works by Latin scholars were translated into Hebrew only a few years after being written. This practice reveals the extraordinary process of philosophical re-acculturation that has its roots in precise ideological and social reasons: implementing contemporary Latin culture rapidly and systematically meant, for late Medieval Hebrew translators, renewing Hebrew wisdom in the light of their Christian neighbours’ thought. This was certainly the purpose of one of the protagonists of Hebrew Scholasticism, Yehudah (...) ben Moses Romano: openly hostile to the philosophical inertia of his Jewish contemporaries, who were still convinced of being the sole holders of the truth bestowed on them from on high, he translated for his co-religionists new knowledge from his Christian colleagues. Particularly intense and sustained were the translations he made of Giles of Rome, which display transversal interests in all aspects of his work. The history of the reception and success of Giles of Rome’s thought on the Jewish world goes far beyond Yehudah Romano’s intellectual project: the reference here is to Yoseph Taitazak, who from his home in Salonica wrote the Porat Yosef, a bizarre Commentary on Ecclesiastes, in which Koholet’s words are used as an occasion for Taitazak to reinterpret the Aristotelian system through a Thomist and Aegidian lens. The inclusion of the Scholastic doctrine in Taitazak’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes, however, responds to a need symmetrically specular to the work of Yehudah Romano: not to proceed with a project of updating Hebrew culture, but to show instead how the Torah is the repository of all knowledge, indeed that the Torah is the knowledge. (shrink)