Lecturers Page Dr. Barak Atiram

Dr. Barak Atiram

Dr. Atiram is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Sapir Academic College, School of Law. He teaches Contracts, American Contract Law, Corporations, Commercial Litigation, Class Actions, and advanced workshops in corporate law.
Dr. Atiram received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law under the supervision of Professor Henry E. Smith (Harvard Law School) and Professor Roy Kreitner (Tel Aviv University). His doctoral dissertation introduced and analyzed a concept he termed “blinded riders,” examining individual and collective losses that arise when affected parties’ voices are excluded from collective decision-making processes—offering a theoretical counterpoint to traditional free-rider models. He holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Atiram’s scholarship examines the gap between legal theory and the realities of market and social practice. His research focuses on contract formation in real-world settings, the role of interim legal instruments, the interaction between custom and formal governance in corporate law, and the accessibility of legal institutions to non-expert actors. Methodologically, his work traces disputes from their human and commercial origins through litigation strategy, doctrinal framing, and judicial resolution, combining doctrinal and institutional analysis with interviews of participants and practitioners and collaborative work with law students. His research engages both landmark Israeli cases, including Rabinai and Kaadan, and recent judicial decisions such as Neve Shalom.
Dr. Atiram founded the School of Law’s Commercial Litigation Workshop, the first practice-oriented litigation workshop at the institution. The workshop analyzes cases litigated by leading law firms, following disputes from their underlying human and commercial dynamics through strategic litigation choices and their implications for judicial reasoning and decision-making.
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Areas of interest and Teaching

Areas of interest

  • Contracts
  • American Contract Law
  • Corporations
  • Commercial Litigation
  • Legal Methodologies
  • Mizrahi Legal Critique
  • Law and Discrimination

Teaching

In current lective year:
  • Contracts
  • Corporate Law
  • Advanced Topics in Transactions with Interested Parties in the Business Corporation
  • class actions and corporations workshop
  • commercial and analytical litigation workshop

Research

Dr. Atiram has developed a distinctive, practice-oriented research methodology grounded in close engagement with real-world legal disputes. Rather than beginning from abstract theory, his research is structured around concrete judicial decisions, selected in collaboration with Sapir law students based on their substantive importance or the legal questions they raise.

Once a case is selected, the research follows the internal structure of the court’s decision and subjects the factual matrix underlying the judgment to independent examination. This examination draws on interviews with parties and practitioners, analysis of pleadings and public records, and review of hearing transcripts and evidentiary materials. Only after reconstructing the dispute as it unfolded in legal practice does the analysis turn to the court’s reasoning.

Through this method, Dr. Atiram examines how legal norms are shaped by factual narratives, litigation strategy, and institutional constraints, and explores both the explicit and latent boundaries of judicial decisions within the case itself and in their broader social context.

 

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