Access Denied—Using Procedure to Restrict Tort Litigation: The Israeli-Palestinian Experience

Procedural barriers which limit individuals’ ability to bring lawsuits—like conditioning litigation upon the provision of a bond—are a subtle way to reduce the volume of tort litigation. The use of such procedural doctrines often spares legislatures from the need to debate the substance of legal rights, especially when those rights are politically controversial. This Article presents a case study of this phenomenon which has escaped scholarly attention, in the intriguing context of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. On the books, a unique mechanism enables non-Israeli citizen Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to bring civil actions for damages against Israel before Israeli civil courts. Yet, since the early 2000s, Israel began using a host of procedural obstacles to restrict Palestinians’ access to its civil courts, effectively precluding their ability to bring claims arising from Israeli military actions. Through fifty-five in-depth interviews with lawyers, policy makers, plaintiffs, and other key stakeholders, alongside a host of secondary sources such as parliamentary protocols and NGO reports, this Article considers the impact this process has on Palestinians’ access to justice. While the use of procedure to encroach on an injured person’s right to compensation may be considered a taking of property, and thus, conceptualized as a dignity taking, such an analysis overlooks a key component of the harm caused to these individuals. Procedural restrictions that block access to the courts also deny Palestinians of their right to participate in the litigation process. Focusing only on property rights—the “end game” of the litigation—ignores benefits derived from the litigation process, including accountability, transparency, and recognition, which may be particularly important when it comes to plaintiffs from vulnerable, disadvantaged groups

Collateral Damages: Domestic Monetary Compensation for Civilians in Asymmetric Conflict

The armed conflicts of the twenty-first century, which often take place among civilian populations rather than on traditional battlefields, push states to acknowledge and rectify the resulting harm to foreign civilians. In particular, asymmetric conflicts, which involve confronting non-state actors within civilian populations, tend to cause more of what has come to be known as ‘collateral damage.’ Such harm to civilians can be inflicted, for instance, in checkpoint shootings, drone attacks, or riot control efforts. How should these losses be addressed? This Article examines two competing models. The U.S. military provides compensation to civilians injured by its activity in Iraq and Afghanistan through a military-run program, governed by the Foreign Claims Act and condolence payments. In contrast, Israel enables non-citizen Palestinians injured by Israeli military actions to bring tort lawsuits before Israeli civil courts. Notwithstanding the differences between these two conflicts, both entail military forces engaging with civilians while assuming quasi-military or policing roles. Yet, scholars have not yet juxtaposed the distinct compensation mechanisms applied in each conflict, vis-à-vis the goals of monetary damages under tort law. This Article seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on tort theory, social psychology, and socio-legal studies, the Article examines the structure of domestic conflict compensation programs. It utilizes data from public records, interviews with relevant stakeholders, NGO reports, and Freedom of Information Act requests to compare the American and Israeli compensation paradigms. Through this analysis, the Article offers guidelines for designing compensation programs that address both government accountability and victims’ needs to effectively redress the harm modern-day conflict causes to civilians

Mott transition and collective charge pinning in electron doped Sr2IrO4

We studied the in-plane dynamic and static charge conductivity of electron doped Sr2IrO4 using optical spectroscopy and DC transport measurements. The optical conductivity indicates that the pristine material is an indirect semiconductor with a direct Mott-gap of 0.55 eV. Upon substitution of 2% La per formula unit the Mott-gap is suppressed except in a small fraction of the material (15%) where the gap survives, and overall the material remains insulating. Instead of a zero energy mode (or Drude peak) we observe a soft collective mode (SCM) with a broad maximum at 40 meV. Doping to 10% increases the strength of the SCM, and a zero-energy mode occurs together with metallic DC conductivity. Further increase of the La substitution doesn't change the spectral weight integral up to 3 eV. It does however result in a transfer of the SCM spectral weight to the zero-energy mode, with a corresponding reduction of the DC resistivity for all temperatures from 4 to 300 K. The presence of a zero-energy mode signals that at least part of the Fermi surface remains ungapped at low temperatures, whereas the SCM appears to be caused by pinning a collective frozen state involving part of the doped electrons

Mott transition and collective charge pinning in electron doped Sr_2IrO_4

We studied the in-plane dynamic and static charge conductivity of electron doped Sr_2IrO_4 using optical spectroscopy and DC transport measurements. The optical conductivity indicates that the pristine material is an indirect semiconductor with a direct Mott gap of 0.55 eV. Upon substitution of 2% La per formula unit the Mott gap is suppressed except in a small fraction of the material (15%) where the gap survives, and overall the material remains insulating. Instead of a zero energy mode (or Drude peak) we observe a soft collective mode (SCM) with a broad maximum at 40 meV. Doping to 10% increases the strength of the SCM, and a zero-energy mode occurs together with metallic DC conductivity. Further increase of the La substitution doesn't change the spectral weight integral up to 3 eV. It does however result in a transfer of the SCM spectral weight to the zero-energy mode, with a corresponding reduction of the DC resistivity for all temperatures from 4 to 300 K. The presence of a zero-energy mode signals that at least part of the Fermi surface remains ungapped at low temperatures, whereas the SCM appears to be caused by pinning a collective frozen state involving part of the doped electrons

Noise Induced Intermittency in a Superconducting Microwave Resonator

We experimentally and numerically study a NbN superconducting stripline resonator integrated with a microbridge. We find that the response of the system to monochromatic excitation exhibits intermittency, namely, noise-induced jumping between coexisting steady-state and limit-cycle responses. A theoretical model that assumes piecewise linear dynamics yields partial agreement with the experimental findings

Optical properties of LaNiO3 films tuned from compressive to tensile strain

Materials with strong electronic correlations host remarkable -- and technologically relevant -- phenomena such as magnetism, superconductivity and metal-insulator transitions. Harnessing and controlling these effects is a major challenge, on which key advances are being made through lattice and strain engineering in thin films and heterostructures, leveraging the complex interplay between electronic and structural degrees of freedom. Here we show that the electronic structure of LaNiO3 can be tuned by means of lattice engineering. We use different substrates to induce compressive and tensile biaxial epitaxial strain in LaNiO3 thin films. Our measurements reveal systematic changes of the optical spectrum as a function of strain and, notably, an increase of the low-frequency free carrier weight as tensile strain is applied. Using density functional theory (DFT) calculations, we show that this apparently counter-intuitive effect is due to a change of orientation of the oxygen octahedra.The calculations also reveal drastic changes of the electronic structure under strain, associated with a Fermi surface Lifshitz transition. We provide an online applet to explore these effects. The experimental value of integrated spectral weight below 2 eV is significantly (up to a factor of 3) smaller than the DFT results, indicating a transfer of spectral weight from the infrared to energies above 2 eV. The suppression of the free carrier weight and the transfer of spectral weight to high energies together indicate a correlation-induced band narrowing and free carrier mass enhancement due to electronic correlations. Our findings provide a promising avenue for the tuning and control of quantum materials employing lattice engineering.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure