Katya Assaf-Zakharov is a senior lecturer at the Law Faculty and the European Forum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She studied law with a minor in sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (LL.B. and LL.M.) and did her Ph.D. studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich as a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Competition and Innovation.

Katya has written on a variety of legal topics, such as advertising, trademarks, patents, freedom of expression, media regulation, defamation, and affirmative action. Her writings critically analyze consumer culture, brand fetishism, and capitalist ideology. They always combine legal analysis with insights from other disciplines, such as economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and semiotics. She is also interested in comparative law, particularly in comparing German and US-American legal regulations and tracing their cultural and philosophic roots. 

Recently, Katya’s research has begun to focus on urban public space. Together with the photographer Tim Schnetgöke, she is working to unearth the narratives embedded in our shared visual environment and criticize their legal regulation, such as the uneven treatment of graffiti or the privileged position of commercial advertising in public space. They aspire to develop a concept of a more inclusive city – one that would grant its residents a right to design and redesign public spaces. They are now looking to start an experiment implementing this idea as a project that would allow city residents to place their contributions – texts of images – in visible urban sites.

Education

1996-2000 – The Hebrew University, Faculty of Law, LL.B
2000-2002 – The Hebrew University, Faculty of Law, LL.M graduated with honors
2003-2006 – Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Faculty of Law, Ph.D. (Supervisor: Reto M. Hilty) graduated summa cum laude
won Law Faculty Prize at Ludwig Maximilian University
won Otto Hahn Medal, an academic award granted by the Max Planck Society

Representative Publications

Reading the Illegible: Can Law Understand Graffiti? (with Tim Schnetgöke), 53 Connecticut Law Review (forthcoming 2021)

The Importance of Being First: Economic and Non-economic Dimensions of Inventorship in US-American and German Law (with Lisa Herzog), The American Journal of Comparative Law (forthcoming 2021)

Work, Identity, and the Regulation of Markets: A Study of Trademark Law in the U.S. and Germany (with Lisa Herzog), 44 Law & Social Inquiry 1083 (2019)

Non-Traditional Trademarks as (Non-Traditional) Means of Cultural Control?, in Non-Traditional Marks and the (Risks of the) Expansion of Trademark  Rights in Singapore (Irene Calboli & Martin Senflleben, eds.) Oxford University Press (2018)

Of Patents and Cobras: Changing the Incentive Structure of Patent Law, 35 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 1 (2017)

Buying Goods and Doing Good: Trademarks and Social Competition, 67 Alabama Law Review 100-139 (2016)

Capitalism against Freedom, 38 NYU Review of Law & Social Change 201 (2015)

Der Zauber der Marke, 2015 GRUR Int. 426 (2015)

Magical Thinking in Trademark Law, 37 Law & Social Inquiry 595 (2012)

Brand Fetishism, 43 Connecticut Law Review 83 (2010)

Der Markenschutz und seine kulturelle Bedeutung: Ein Vergleich des deutschen mit dem US-amerikanischen, 2009 GRUR Int. 1 (2009) 

The Dilution of Culture and the Law of Trademarks, 49 IDEA 1 (2008)

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, 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 18 books and published 80 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, American Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative 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 Y. 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); 
Chinese translation by Xu Dafeng (Fu Dan University Press, Shanghai China, 2015);

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);

 “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 I. Ritov);

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

Yitzhak Zamir was born in 1931 in Warsaw, Poland. He completed a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science at the High School of Law and Economics in Tel Aviv and studied for his master’s in law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while also studying Political Science and International Relations. In 1959 he received his doctorate of law from the University of London. In 1955-1956 he served as an intern to Supreme Court Justice Yoel Sussman. Zamir joined the Faculty of Law in 1961 and served as dean from 1975 to 1978. between the years 1978-1986 Zamir served as Attorney General, leading the struggle to investigate the Bus 300 affair and to prosecute those responsible for the incident. In the years 1988-1991 he served as president of the Press Council, and in 1991 he founded the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa, serving as its first dean. Zamir was appointed a Supreme Court Justice in 1994.Zamir’s academic and public work contributed to Israeli administrative and public law. His book on administrative authority is the most comprehensive work published on the subject to date and is considered the founding document for the field of general administrative law. Zamir has received a number of prizes for his legal work, including the Zeltner Prize to encourage research in the Legal Sciences, the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award, the Knesset Speaker’s Price for Advancing the Rule of Law and Democratic Values, the Israel Prize for Legal Research, an EMET (Art-Science-Culture) prize in the legal sciences category, and the Israel Association of Public Law’s Gorni Award.

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