In Israeli law eighteen statutes now regulate the legal status of various kinds of disabled persons. These statutes apply to about twice the number of different categories of disabled persons, classified in groups or classes, according to the cause and circumstances of disablement. Ignoring voluntary arrangements, the number of legal statuses or classifications (i.e. the complex of legal rights, pecuniary and in specie, together with the conditions of entitlement) may be put at eleven, which includes groups of people disabled de facto who are not recognised as disabled under law since they do not come within the statutory definition of disablement or otherwise meet the conditions of entitlement. The number of statuses is smaller than the number of statutes because some of the latter merely extend the application of other statutes in pari materia.

If we address ourselves to the substance of the legal status of these disabled persons, the general impression obtained reflects a kind of order of preference among the different groups, sometimes with considerable gaps. At the lowest level are the most deprived, the de facto disabled, who lack all rights as such, and the ordinary disabled (those who do not fall into any specific category but are recognised as disabled—the “new” and “long-standing” invalids of Chapter 6B of the National Insurance Law (Consolidated Version), 1968, in respect of whom a paucity of rights exists, in the nature only of ultimum subsidium. At the upper level stand the most preferred groups under existing law, traffic-accident victims and disabled soldiers.

Religious or communal affiliation is one of the major factors in the choice of law and jurisdiction in matters of personal status. First, a religious court has jurisdiction only if all parties belong to the religion or community of that court. Where the parties involved in a matter of personal status belong to different religious communities, only the President of the Supreme Court is entitled to confer jurisdiction upon a particular religious court. Secondly, religious affiliation determines the bond between a person and the substantive law which will apply to any matter of his personal status. The importance of such affiliation is declining as legislation fixing unified, territorial norms applicable to all religions and communities increases. However, because personal law continues to play a major role in our legal system, religious affiliation, too, continues to be a focal point of interreligious disputes. Here the lack of a consistent, unified system for regulation of these inter-religious disputes is particularly noticeable, and the solutions proposed are remarkable for their pragmatism and their evasion of the basic problems.

According to the famous “Coase Theorem”, market forces, under given conditions, will automatically, without any external intervention, bring about an efficient allocation of resources. These conditions, necessary for the smooth operation of the “invisible hand” which leads to efficiency, are denoted as “absence of transaction costs”, as the presence of transaction costs may impede this desired process. The main legal implication outlined by Coase is that absent transaction cost, there is no need, and no place, from an efficiency point of view, for liability rules: resource allocation would be the same either with or without them. An act which is efficient will be carried out despite a liability rule which imposes the burden of compensation on the actor. On the other hand, an inefficient act will be barred by market forces without the help of liability rules.

Since the preceding article was written, the Kahn Committee, mentioned therein, has presented its report with a minority report by one of its members on the communications media. The central feature of the report is the Bill of a Protection of Privacy Law which the Committee recommends; a copy of the Bill is appended to show Israel thinking on the subject and to illustrate how far the Bill meets the matters raised by Dr. Gavison.

Apart from a very general discussion of the problems involved, the report contains a brief sketch by Dr. N. Rakover of those aspects of the subjects which are covered by traditional Jewish law and a comparative study by Dr. Gavison herself of the position mainly in the U.S.A., England, Germany, France and Canada and incidentally in Sweden, Switzerland, the Argentine, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, with special reference to recent legislation.

For the record it may be noted that the Committee was appointed in August 1974 by the Minister of Justice to examine the means by which protection of privacy can be secured. It held 16 meetings and heard or received in writing the views of various institutions and individuals.

The purpose of this short essay is to examine how the constitution could contribute in the area of substantive criminal law. We should distinguish between two levels: the theoretical level and the realistic level. From a theoretical point of view, a lot could be expected from judicial review. The reason is the very broad gap between the principles of criminal law and the norms and real life of criminal law. Judicial review can function as a guardian — perhaps the guardian of the principles of criminal law.

To exemplify the gap between criminal law in theory and criminal law in practice, it is sufficient to mention three issues: Criminal law in theory is an instrument of last resort, but the reality of criminal law is that it is often an instrument of first resort. Secondly, in theory, the most basic principle of criminal law is the principle of legality, of prior warning, but when we read the statutory provisions of criminal law we understand that the citizen is not the real addresee of these norms. When we read case law in criminal law, we find out that real interpretation in criminal law has very little to do with prior warning.

States have their nationals and religions have their religionists, each of whom shares in a distinct and inherited identity. In considering whether Jewry is one of those communities which consists of dependents born into it, three distinct variations arise: there are those who recognize that Jewry is a unitary group with the right to have a National Home; there are those who hold that Jewry, as a community, must be combatted as an enemy; there are those who view Jewry as a group of individuals, the interests of which Jewish organizations (not necessarily of a Zionist orientation) have found it to be their responsibility to safeguard in situations where their interests were not safeguarded as nationals of specific States.

In politological terms, the first and third combine positively and the second and third negatively, but in each combination Jewish organizations were faced with the obligation to act on an international level under conditions and by means so novel in terms of international practice that they were termed unprecedented and sui generis, and for which international law had no place to integrate the kind of non-governmental protective activity which was evoked, or to illustrate how a victim's experience creates law, or how scattered communities operate generically, within patterns exclusive to them.

One of the central, and most controversial, issues of historic international law concerns the distinction between the territorial sea, over which the sovereignty of the coastal State extends (and by implication also its legal system), and the high seas which are subject to the doctrine of the freedom of the seas. Involved in that controversy is first and foremost the very idea of a division of the waters of the sea into two distinct juridical institutes. In the present century alone this question has been unsuccessfully tackled by a whole series of major international conferences on the law of the sea, held in 1930 under the auspices of the League of Nations, and in 1958, 1960 and 1973–75 under the auspices of the United Nations—this latter conference being still in progress at the time of writing.

The hearing framework known as a further hearing has been familiar to the general public in Israel for some time. This procedure is granted upon the petition of the parties or by the justices of a specific panel of the Supreme Court. However comprehensible the concept appears to be, in view of its simple designation, this legal device has not merited meaningful attention in legal research. By law, a further hearing is a situation where “in a matter on which the Supreme Court has ruled, with a panel of three or more justices, it may rule at a further hearing as a panel of five or more justices.” In such a case, an expanded Supreme Court bench hears a matter that has already been ruled, but the Court may also convene an expanded panel in other instances. It may also do so in a case that was originally heard by an expanded panel without being designated a further hearing, in which case, it will simply be designated an “expanded panel.” This article will address the concept of the further hearing, as opposed to the phenomenon of “expanded panels” in general. The first part of this article will be theoretical, and we will seek a conceptual understanding of this legal institution. In the second part, the article will address empirical research on this subject and will present quantitative data on further hearings held in the course of over thirty years of Supreme Court adjudication (1970-2000). The third and last part of this article will present possible conclusions that may be drawn from the empirical results and will question the need for such an institution.

In a democratic country an independent justice system plays a major role in protecting human rights and the rule of law. However, an independent judicial system is at risk from a number of factors that derive from outside the sytsem as well as from within. The external dangers facing judicial independence are often discussed; whereas the internal perils that weaken the system as well as judicial independence, are far less known. This article will focus on the danger from within and will discuss the judicial administration's influence on human rights, specifically the right to due process under the law.

The late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht once expressed the view that “if international law is, in some ways, at the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps, even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law”. This led him to the conclusion that the international lawyer must therefore do his duty, in the three particular areas to which he was then drawing the attention of his readers, “with determination though without complacency, and perhaps not always very hopefully”. The three spheres which Lauterpacht considered as meriting the attention of international lawyers at the time at which he wrote, 1953, were “further legal regulation of the humanitarian fringe of the problems involved in the use of new weapons of war, sustained exposition and clarification of the far-reaching provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the further clarification of matters not covered by the Geneva Conventions, including the implication of the principle that the law of war is binding not only upon States but also upon individuals”. This great jurist did not live to see the current endeavours that are being made to carry out a revision of the international law of war and the increasing attention that is being paid to the humanitarian content of that law, and even more specifically, to the quest for better and more effective means of implementation of that law.

An Israeli lawyer who reads Professor Engel's very interesting remarks “On the Evidence of U.S. Treaty Law” will feel like the poor man who reacted to a rich man's complaints by saying: “For you the diamonds are sparse, for me the soup is thin”.

In Israel there are two official publications which give information about treaties:

1) Kitvei Amana—Israel Treaty Documents; and 2) Yalkut HaPirsumim—Government Notices. The Ministry of Justice is responsible for these two publications but it follows the advice of the Foreign Ministry in all substantive matters concerning the publication of information on treaties.

The treaties to which Israel has become a party are published in Kitvei Amana. So far, some 22 volumes have been published in this series. Bilateral agreements are published in the two languages in which the treaty was concluded, i.e., Hebrew and the official language of the other party. As to multilateral conventions, a Hebrew translation of them is published, together with the original text in one or two of the official languages of the treaty. For example, the English and the French version of the U.N. Charter were published, as well as a Hebrew translation. Together with the text of the treaty, some additional relevant information is also given: a list (with dates) of the signatures and ratifications of the treaty, date of its coming into force, date of its coming into force for Israel.

This article compares the law of foundations (charities) in Germany and Israel. What is a foundation and what it is created for, may receive different answers in different legal systems. When an Israeli jurist refers to hekdesh, he is not referring to the same concepts included in the German Stiftung. These differences find expression both in practical and theoretical matters. For example, German law recognizes the foundation as a legal personality, a characteristic lacking in Israeli law. Moreover, in Germany a foundation managing a business enterprise, or an enterprise adopting the legal form of a foundation, is an accepted phenomenon, but this is not accepted in Israel.

To understand what a foundation is, it is necessary to distinguish between the different types of foundations: on one hand public or private ones, and on the other hand religious and secular foundations. This article discusses the methods of creating a foundation (mortis causa or inter vivos) and examines the elements needed to create it: purposes, assets (one of the central points in Foundations Law is to ensure their efficient use) and management. The comparison does not obviate the problem of state supervision, needed to ensure the right of the beneficiaries and of the entire community to correct usage of the endowed resources.

In the final analysis, the paper stresses the importance of comparative law as an instrument aimed to broaden legal theory and enrich the dialogue between jurists of different countries.