Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Eyal Zamir
2026-2027
Home institution
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, IL
Country of origin (home institution)
Israel
Discipline(s)
Law
Theme(s)
Artificial Intelligence; Contemporary violence & Justice
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Eyal Zamir's research lies at the intersection of law, economics, psychology, and philosophy. He draws on insights and methodologies from multiple disciplines to enrich legal analysis. His work combines doctrinal, theoretical, and empirical approaches, spanning private and public law, legal decision-making, and the relationship between law, justice, and artificial intelligence. His research addresses contract interpretation, paternalism, mandatory and default rules, cost-benefit analysis subject to moral constraints, and judicial decision-making.
Eyal is the Augusto Levi Professor of Commercial Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL) and a former Dean of the Faculty of Law. He held visiting positions at Harvard University (US), Yale University (US), New York University (US), the University of Pennsylvania (US), Georgetown University (US), the University of California, Los Angeles (US), and the University of Zürich (CH). He authored fourteen books, edited six books, and published nearly hundred articles, including four books with Oxford University Press. His articles have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, and Virginia Law Review; the Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, American Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law, University of Toronto Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Public Administration Review.
Research Project
Law, Justice, Reason-Giving, and Artificial Intelligence
How do judges, ordinary people, and AI make decisions? Eyal Zamir draws on behavioral science to explore when judges do not strictly apply legal norms, how emotions shape our intimate choices, and whether artificial intelligence reasons like humans.
In a recently published article (with Ori Katz), Eyal Zamir demonstrated that requiring legal decision-makers to provide reasons for their decisions increases adherence to formal legal rules when those rules conflict with intuitions of justice. He now extends this inquiry to AI. He finds that large language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, are substantially more formalistic than humans and are hardly affected by reason-giving requirements. He also investigates how reason-giving affects intermediate outcomes between fully accepting or entirely dismissing a claim, using surveys, vignette experiments, and observational analyses.
Turning from institutional decision-making to intimate ones, a second project offers a behavioral analysis of family law. It examines how cognitive biases, emotions, and altruistic motivations shape intimate decisions and interact with legal rules. The goal is to use these behavioral insights to improve substantive family law, as well as decisions about marriage and divorce.
Bringing these strands together at the level of theory, Doron Teichman and Eyal Zamir are substantially revising the first edition of their co-authored book, Behavioral Law and Economics (OUP, 2018), updating it in light of recent significant developments in behavioral science, artificial intelligence, and public policy.
Research Interests:
decision making; behavioral science; emotions; artificial intelligence