Remedies obviously serve as instruments of rights enforcement, but they also participate in the constitution of the rights they help enforce. Although institutional reasons bring about certain gaps between the content of rights and the judicial response to their infringement, the constitutive role of remedies introduces significant subtlety into the domain of rights. Thus, the choice of different remedies, as well as the possibility of incorporating qualifications, limitations, and even obligations, allows private law to accommodate qualitative (and normatively attractive) distinctions between different types of rights.

This phenomenon of the multiplicity of rights manifests itself in property law as well. Property law is composed of a distinct, though not infinite, number of property institutions, each reflecting a particular balance of values that is attached to a specific category of social contexts and a specific category of resources.

This variety and the contingent facts on which it partly relies should not be embarrassing. Quite the contrary: a truly liberal law must resist uniformity and endorse multiplicity, which is both freedom-enhancing and individuality-enhancing. By appreciating private law’s multiplicity and understanding the normative value of the (at times contingent) choices on which it relies, as well as their potential critical bite, private law theory can provide a better understanding of the order embedded in this complex legal mosaic and, possibly, even fruitfully contribute to its improvement.

The empirical studies revealed that in consensual divorce and inheritance proceedings, the Israeli rabbinical courts attract clients by offering a relatively cheap and efficient alternative to the civil family courts and inheritance registrars. However, the practices of the rabbinical courts diverge greatly in divorce disputes as compared to inheritance conflicts. While in the former, the rabbinical courts fight to preserve their authority and strive to deliver independent rulings, they avoid jurisdiction and jurisprudence in the context of inheritance conflicts. Moreover, whereas in divorce proceedings, rabbinical court judges consistently assert their judicial autonomy even when the result is severe gender discrimination, in inheritance proceedings, a concern with gender equality lies at the foundation of their attempts to mediate between rival family members and to refer conflicts to the family courts.

Religious, cultural, and institutional variables are offered to explain the similarities and divergences in the rabbinical courts' practices and perceptions when dealing with divorce and inheritance matters, as well as to explain the willingness of religious tribunals to adapt to liberal values in certain circumstances. This paper thus seeks to contribute to the theoretical and policy-making debates between legal multiculturalism and liberal stances.

Our analysis focuses on the three grounds for non-intervention. First, with respect to the self-correcting nature of excessive prices, we illustrate how excessive prices, in and of themselves, do not attract new entry when potential entrants are either informed or uninformed about their post-entry profits. Referring to our previous work on this subject, we question the South African Competition Tribunal’s holding in the Mittal case with respect to the prerequisite conditions for intervention against excessive pricing. Second, we consider how the difficulties of assessing what is an excessive price affected the outcome in the Mittal litigation. Without underestimating these difficulties, we consider how they may be alleviated in certain cases through reasonable methods for inferring what may constitute an excessive price. Third, while acknowledging the possible validity of concerns about chilling ex ante investment, we outline instances in which these concerns should not serve to support nonintervention. It should be stressed that this article does not advocate across-the-board intervention. It does, however, question the validity of a categorical “hands-off” approach, which deems excessive prices to be outside the realm of competition law. We consider separately the weight that should be assigned to each ground for non-intervention. Subsequently, we argue in favor of a case-by-case approach which explores the factual matrix of each case and considers the benefits, costs, and net effects of intervention.

I suggest that rather than trying to extract one regulative principle of the entire terrain of property, we should appreciate the value of the heterogeneity of property's domain. The multiplicity of property institutions is the key to property's normative promise. Property can be the home of both independence and interdependence (and can serve the other property values as well), and thus provide people with valuable options of human flourishing. Only by facilitating such diverse forms of human interaction – different property institutions – can property promote (as it does) the freedom-enhancing value of pluralism and the individuality-enhancing role of multiplicity, which are so crucial to the liberal ideal of justice.

This Article provides an updated state-of-the-art review of the limited available empirical data on women as legators and on women as heirs in different parts of the world. The review is based on 23 studies, including the original results from a study the author conducted on inheritance in Israel, which illuminates the reach insights that can be drown from an inheritance study that focuses on gender.

The review shows a sharp dichotomy between the ongoing discrimination women experience in non-Western societies in relation to inheritance and the social reality in the West in which inheritance is a rare economic space in which women enjoy privilege, power, and control. Although egalitarian inheritance laws have had a dramatic impact on women’s representation in intestacy and their participation in will-writing in the West, the data demonstrate that even in this part of the world, cultural patriarchal practices persist and limit women's inheritance rights and, accordingly, point to the importance of creating legal mechanisms that can counterbalance these practices. Moreover, the available data indicate the value of freedom of testation for women and the importance of ceasing to regard care as cause for suspicion in inheritance law, and instead viewing it as a practice deserving of reward.

Finally, the Article identifies the areas in which further research on gender and inheritance is warranted, hopefully spurring greater interest and developments in the field.

Our mission in this Essay is to describe legal theory as an enterprise robust enough to justify separate naming. Legal theory focuses on the work of society's coercive normative institutions. It studies the traditions of these institutions and the craft typifying their members, while at the same time continuously challenging their outputs by demonstrating their contingency and testing their desirability. In performing the latter tasks, legal theory necessarily absorbs lessons from law’s neighboring disciplines. But at its best, legal theory is more than a sophisticated synthesis of relevant insights from these friendly neighbors, because of its pointed attention to the persistent jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, notably the relationship between law's normativity and its coerciveness and the implications of its institutional and structural characteristics.

Before we turn to elaborate on these features, we begin with an outline of the three other important discourses about law: law and policy; socio-historical analysis of law; and law as craft. Sketching these three genres of legal scholarship is instrumental for our task because analyzing the ways in which legal theory is different from these other modes helps us characterize legal theory.

My first task in this Lecture is descriptive. I will show how law assumes its subjects’ rationality and also seeks to transcend it. I will also demonstrate how legal theory presents a mirror-image of this seeming paradox insofar as judges are concerned: while it expects judges to transcend their self- and group-interest, it suspects that this ideal neither will nor can be perfectly attained. These attitudes may at first glance seem confusing, if not confused, hence my second task, which is to explain and ultimately celebrate these ambivalences. My third and final task is to sketch the complex ways by which law and legal theory face the challenge of sustaining these happy ambivalences.

This is valid even when the risks that materialized are usual, or background, risks that in themselves would not justify the enactment of the statute. The Article also shows that many court decisions that applied the limiting liability conditions and excluded tort liability because the conditions were not met could have reached the same outcome but on different grounds. Finally, the Article extends its normative argument to common law negligence.