Does the Law Matter? Win Rates and Law Reforms

Abstract

The empirical legal study of tax law has developed greatly in recent years and has yielded many insights into the judiciary in particular and the legal system as a whole. This article continues this process by evaluating, through the prism of tax litigation and based on theories of analyzing judicial decision making, the effect of law reforms on win rates and whether win rates can help predict future law reforms. The analysis is based on a comprehensive database (census, not sample) of 1,330 tax decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court (ISC), divided into seven tax categories, and covering 60 years of tax jurisprudence since Israel's establishment . The data enabled us to find changes in win rates over time, among different tax categories, and in relation to several tax reforms. The detailed analysis found that law reforms have a significant effect on win rates and that win rates have a predictive ability for future law reform. These findings strengthen the legal model and the neo-institutional theory and do not provide support for selection effect theory or the attitudinal model regarding their explanatory function in analyzing judicial decisions.

Ideological influences on governance and regulation: The comparative case of supreme courts

“…Weinshall () found significant correlations between the religiosity of Israeli Supreme Court justices – as a measure of their religious ideology – and the votes they cast in freedom of religion cases. Changing degrees of ideologically‐driven decisions also were found in the Israeli setting according to jurisprudential changes (Gliksberg ), the deciding panel's composition (Eisenberg et al ), and across mandatory and discretionary jurisdictions (Eisenberg et al ). In India, Shankar () studied judicial voting patterns and found that in civil liberty and social rights cases, Indian Supreme Court judges did not show pure attitudinal patterns of decisionmaking (Sathe ; Gadbois ) .…”

Avaliação do Risco Judicial:

“…Em outras palavras, a decisão de um juiz é influenciada não apenas por restrições institucionais ou pelo risco em decidir com base unicamente em suas prioridades e preferências, mas também pelo senso de obrigação de agir de acordo com a lei (WEINSHALL-MARGEL, 2011). Enfatizando a teoria neoinstitucional na função analítica e explicativa das decisões judiciais, observou-se que as reformas da legislação têm um efeito significativo sobre as taxas de vitória e as taxas de vitória têm uma capacidade preditiva para uma futura reforma da lei, conforme análise da evolução do direito tributário em Israel (GLIKSBERG, 2014).…”

Developing High‐Quality Data Infrastructure for Legal Analytics: Introducing the Israeli Supreme Court Database

“…The cites in parentheses are examples; for each high court many more papers and books have been published. The Israeli Supreme Court alone has generated scores of studies (e.g., Sommer ; Eisenberg et al , 2012, 2013; Weinshall‐Margel ; Dotan 2013; Gliksberg ; Rosenthal et al ; Anidjar et al forthcoming). …”