Prof. Eyal Zamir is Augusto Levi Professor of Commercial Law at the Hebrew University, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Law, and was the founding director of the Aharon Barak Center for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies and a founding member of the Center for Empirical Studies of Decision-Making and the Law. He was a visiting scholar or visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, NYU School of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, UCLA School of Law, University of Zürich, Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, USC School of Law, and the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London.

Prof. Zamir’s research interests include economic and behavioral analysis of law, empirical legal studies, contract law and theory, and normative ethics and law. He authored or edited 20 books and published 93 articles. His latest four books were published with Oxford University Press. His articles were published in journals such as the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, California Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Texas Law Review, American Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law, European Journal of International Law, University of Toronto Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, and Public Administration Review.

Prof. Zamir presented his work in numerous conferences and workshops, including the annual meetings of the American Law and Economics Association and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.

Prof. Zamir has been awarded numerous fellowships and prizes, including the Fulbright Researcher Award; the Rothschild Fellowship; the Hebrew University President’s Prize for Excellent Young Scholar named after Yoram Ben Porat (first recipient); the Zeltner Prize for Senior Scholar; and the Justice Shneor Zalman Cheshin Prize for Academic Excellence in Law for Senior Scholar.

 

Education

1982 - LL.B. cum laude, Law Faculty, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel;

Representative publications

Law, Economics, and Morality 376 pp. (OUP, 2010, with Barak Medina); 
(translated to Chinese);

The Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and the Law X+ 824 pp. (co-edited with Doron Teichman);

Law, Psychology, and Morality: The Role of Loss Aversion 258+18 pp. (OUP, 2014);

Behavioral Law and Economics XVII + 618 pp. (OUP, 2018, with Doron Teichman); (translated to Chinese and Serbian);

 “The Inverted Hierarchy of Contract Interpretation and Supplementation,” 97 Columbia L. Rev. 1710-803 (1997);

“The Efficiency of Paternalism,” 84 Virginia Law Review 229-86 (1998);

“The Missing Interest: Restoration of the Contractual Equivalence,” 93 Virginia Law Review 59-138 (2007);

“Law, Morality, and Economics: Integrating Moral Constraints with Economic Analysis of Law”, 96 California Law Review 323-91 (2008) (with Barak Medina);

“Revisiting the Debate over Attorneys’ Contingent Fees: A Behavioral Analysis,” 38 Journal of Legal Studies 245-88 (2010) (with Ilana Ritov);

“Loss Aversion, Omission Bias, and the Burden of Proof in Civil Litigation,” 41 Journal of Legal Studies 165-207 (2012) (with Ilana Ritov);

“Contract Law and Theory – Three Views of the Cathedral,” 81 University of Chicago Law Review 2077–2123 (2014);

“Affirmative Action and other Group Tradeoff Policies: Identifiability of the Adversely Affected People” 125 Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50-60 (2014) (with Ilana Ritov);

“Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited Policymakers” Public Administration Review (2017) (with Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan);

“A Theory of Mandatory Rules: Typology, Policy, and Design” 99 Texas Law Review 283–340 (2020) (featuring Ian Ayres);

“Enforced Performance in Common-Law versus Civil-Law Systems: An Empirical Study of a Legal Transformation” 68 American Journal of Comparative Law 1–54 (2020) (with Leon Anidjar and Ori Katz);

“Do People Like Mandatory Rules? The Impact of Framing and Phrasing” 45 Law and Social Inquiry 1052–92 (2020) (with Ori Katz);

“Do People Like Mandatory Rules? The Choice Between Disclosures, Defaults, And Mandatory Rules in Supplier–Customer Relationships” 18 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 421–60 (2021) (with Ori Katz);

“Giving Reasons as a Means to Enhance Compliance with Legal Norms” 72 University of Toronto Law Journal 316–55 (2022) (with Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir and Ori Katz);

“Exponential Growth Bias and the Law: Why Do We Save Too Little, Borrow Too Much, and Fail to React on Time to Deadly Pandemics and Climate Change?” 75 Vanderbilt Law Review 1345–400 (2022) (with Doron Teichman);

“Substituting Invalid Contract Terms: Theory and Preliminary Empirical Findings” 48 Law and Social Inquiry 780–818 (2023) (with Ori Katz);

“Biases in Legal Decision Making: Comparing Prosecutors, Defense Attorneys, Law Students, And Laypersons” 20 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 852–94 (2023) (with Doron Teichman and Ilana Ritov);

“Law, Justice, and Reasong-Giving” 22 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 243–66 (2025) (with Ori Katz).