Prof. Dr. Uriel Procaccia

(Rechtswissenschaftler, Radzyner School of Law, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel)

Curriculum vitae

Personal

Date and place of birth: September 10, 1943, Tel Aviv, Israel
Married to Dr. Anat Horovitz. Four children.
Citizenship: Israeli and Italian.

Academic career

LL.B, Hebrew University, 1967, magna cum laude
LL.M. Hebrew University, 1969, summa cum laude
S.J.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1972.
Dean of Law School, Hebrew University, 1996-1999.
Professor and Head of the Graduate Program of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz - Professor of Corporate Law at Hebrew University,(since 2003- Professor Emeritus

Visiting professorships

Columbia University Law School
Benjamin Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University
Tulane University Law School,
The University of Southern California Law Center
Tübingen University
The Russian Federation Academy of Jurisprudence
California Institute of Technology („Cal Tech“, where I taught „Rational Choice“)

Professional Life

My professional life can be roughly divided into three main stages as follows.

In my young years I followed the traditional analytic approach to law. I contributed scores of publications with a special emphasis on commercial subjects, including insurance, insolvency and corporate law. The most comprehensive publication of that era is my book: Uriel Procaccia, Bankruptcy Law and Civil Legislation in Israel (The Harry Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, 1984).
Following a series of visits to the University of Southern California and my association with some of its stellar figures in the domain of Law and Economics, I became a convert to that movement. I was the first Israeli scholar to introduce Law and Economics to the growing corpus of young Israeli scholars, until it became today the leading theoretical legal discipline among our domestic academic writers. During that period I was commissioned to compose a draft for a new law of corporations in our country. The resulting draft was later adopted, with modifications, to become the Israeli Companies Law, 1999, the first of its kind to be consciously informed by the burgeoning literature in Law and Economics. My main ideas which led to the crafting of that draft, were embodied in my most comprehensive publication of this period: Uriel Procaccia, A New Corporate Law for Israel, (The Harry Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, 1989).
The third and (thus far) last period in the development of my professional career is marked by my growing interest in law and culture. Being convinced that „pure“ legal analysis is devoid of normative content, and that the Law and Economics movement, in spite of its descriptive and prescriptive power, fails to take into account crucial elements of human behavior, I became engrossed with the inter-relationship of law and its broader cultural surroundings. The principal insight informing my current obsession with this subject is that law shares with all other cultural manifestations a clear common denominator - they all reflect the cultural assumptions, creeds and commitments of a given culture, and hence law cannot be fully comprehended without reference to those cultural variables. My most ambitions publication along these lines is: Uriel Procaccia, Russian Culture, Property Rights and the Market Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Miscellaneous

Active in several civil rights struggles, including struggles for the maintenance of the Rule of Law in the Occupied Territories
Frequent contributor to the daily press, both in the area of civil rights and in the area of corporate law and securities regulation
Counsel to scores of corporations, government agencies and NGO's in matters pertaining to corporate law.