Abstract

ATA v. Schwartz is a classic torts case in Israeli caselaw. It has a large-factory villian creating noise pollution, a lone neighbor turning to the courts for protection, and three judicial decisions upholding the citizen's right to close down the factory when the latter cannot meet the ordinance's standard. Furthermore, it is the first case the Israeli Supreme Court dealt with arguments explicitly based on Coase, Calabresi and Posner - utterly rejecting them. The case has been used to explain that 'Law and Economics' is not accepted Israeli law, and that tort law protects the weak (citizen) from the strong (factory). In this paper I take issue with the standard view of the case, offering two opposing readings of the same text. The first reading shows us how efficiency was sacrificed for 'justice' and the narrative construct used by the Justice writing the majority opinion to do so. The second reading reverses the analysis - showing that the 'small vs. big' and anti-economic-analysis rhetoric masks a completely opposite result. The explicit rejection of economic analysis is shown to be slightly exaggerated, relative to the majority-writer's actual ruling (hint: the factory was not closed). The singular case is used as a vehicle for a broader argument regarding the difficulty of finding 'the correct result', or 'what this means' about Law and Economics. [Hebrew].