The impact of economic theory on the israeli case law on property

The article discusses whether, and to what extent, Israeli case-law in the fields of property law and planning law is influenced by economic-efficiency considerations. The article critically examines three major areas of property law: compensation for injury to lands' development rights, remedies for unlawful building on another's property, and conflicting transactions in land. All three examples illustrate that assessing the impact of economic theory is somewhat complex. On the one hand, judges are increasingly cognizant of the economic approach to law, and some of them tend to include economic-oriented considerations in their reasoning. Judges opposed to efficiency analysis often mention this theory, even if pejoratively, in their rulings. Economic factors cannot and are not ignored. On the other hand, the judges' implementation of the economic calculus is often simplistic or even flawed. Moreover, there sometimes exists an inverse correlation between the identity of the judges most sympathetic to economic reasoning and the identity of the judges who have adopted the most efficient rule.