Issachar (Issi) Rosen-Zvi

Issachar (Issi) Rosen-Zvi is a Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law and Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. Between 2018-2022 he served as the and the Vice Dean of the Faculty. Professor Rosen-Zvi obtained his LL.B. (magna cum laude) from Bar-Ilan University, his LL.M. in law and sociology from Tel Aviv University (summa cum laude). He continued his studies at Stanford Law School, where he received his J.S.D. in June of 2002. He clerked for the Honorable Chief Justice Aharon Barak of the Israel Supreme Court and practiced law at Kirkland & Ellis, LLP in New York. Professor Rosen-Zvi’s areas of research include civil procedure, administrative law, local government law and the law of democracy. He was a visiting professor at Cornell Law School, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, SciencesPo Law School (Paris), Goethe University (Frankfurt), and the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Spain). His works were published in the most prestigious law journals including Stanford Law Review, U. Penn. Law Review, Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Law & Society Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

Contact: yr2675@nyu.edu

Research Project

Fusing Procedure: Reconstructing Dispute Resolution Beyond the Public/Private Divide. This project examines the transformation of civil procedure beyond the traditional distinction between public adjudication and private dispute resolution. For decades, debates over the “privatization” of civil justice have divided procedural scholars into opposing camps. Critics argue that arbitration, settlement, and other forms of ADR undermine courts as public institutions responsible for articulating collective norms and securing democratic legitimacy. Supporters, by contrast, celebrate privatization as advancing efficiency, flexibility, and party autonomy. Despite their disagreement, both camps share a foundational assumption: that the distinction between “public” and “private” dispute resolution should determine the allocation of procedural rights and obligations. The project challenges this premise. It argues that the public/private divide in procedure functions less as an accurate description of contemporary dispute resolution than as a resilient social institution embedded in legal consciousness and institutional design. Over the past several decades, courts have increasingly internalized practices associated with private dispute resolution—managerial judging, settlement facilitation, procedural customization, and confidentiality—while ADR institutions have absorbed features traditionally associated with public adjudication, including due process protections, reason-giving, and transparency obligations. Yet procedural reform has remained trapped within a logic of “hybridity,” preserving the very categories whose adequacy is in question. The project proposes a new framework: “fused procedure.” Rather than allocating procedural entitlements according to whether a forum is labeled public or private, fused procedure reconceives courts and ADR as components of a unified procedural system. Procedural rights and obligations should instead be calibrated according to the social goods and social costs implicated in particular disputes, including democratic legitimacy, norm generation, information production, deterrence, equality, congestion, and public subsidy. The project thus advances a broader theoretical claim about institutional change in law and offers a new model for procedural design beyond the public/private divide.