Only a brief interval separated the signing into law of the two Basic Laws of 1992 and the rhetorical elevation of that moment to revolutionary significance. However, use of the term “constitutional revolution” to describe the addition of the Basic Laws on Freedom of Occupation and Human Dignity and Freedom to the corpus of Israeli fundamental law was destined to have more than rhetorical significance. Had the characterization been made by someone other than the next President of the Supreme Court, it might have attracted a modicum of public attention before fading from view, perhaps to be remembered only as a felicitous example of wishful thinking.

The rules of criminal law that govern participation in crime often include special provisions with regard to accomplice liability for the commission of collateral offenses by the principal in the course of the unlawful undertaking. While some Anglo-American jurisdictions limit accomplice liability to cases where the commission of the collateral offense is effectively contemplated by the participant, other jurisdictions, including Israel, also provide for punishment of the participant where the collateral offense is reasonably foreseeable. Accordingly, participants are held liable for crimes that are perpetrated incidentally to the commission of the projected crime, on the basis of an objective, rather than subjective, foresight standard. Whether this deviation from the prevalent paradigm of accomplice liability is justified in principle and policy constitutes the main focus of this article.

The tension between the norms of gender equality and religious freedom is a major focus of international human rights debate. States that adopt religious law contend that gender discriminatory religious practices are protected under international law guaranteeing rights of cultural autonomy and religious freedom. Others argue that only discriminatory practices that are not the product of State action but, rather, take place in the private realm of civil society should be accorded such protection. Many women's rights activists, on the other hand, urge the State to actively reform religious law and restructure cultural practices even in the private realm, “not only as a means of ending gender-based restrictions on specific human rights but also as an essential step toward dismantling systematic gender inequality” perpetuated in traditionalist cultures. The larger philosophic issue underlying this debate, how to reconcile universal human rights and multiculturalism, understood as the primacy of group cultural identity as a morally and politically significant category, is complex, but not new. It is the age-old one, as Joseph Raz has put it, “of how to combine the truth of universalism with the truth in particularism.”

The German Democratic Republic's practice of firing upon ist own citizens is well-known. The question arises whether acts which were exempt from punishment in the GDR can be punished today in reunified Germany? The West German Constitution expresses the notion that retroactive effect of penal laws is prohibited. However, the German Courts, above the Federal Constitutional Court (decision of 24/10/1996) have affirmed the criminal liability of East German border guards based on G. Radbruch's “natural law doctrine.”

As a conclusion, it becomes clear that the illegality of acts of Berlin Wall guards can only be derived by following either the Federal Constitutional Court's natural law strategy or the strategy of a strict Statutory Positivism (Gesetzespositivismus); since it can be shown that official instructions and orders to shoot were not permissible beneath the level of constitutional provisions, normal statutes or regulations justifiy restrictions on the human dignity and integrity (in particular the right to life and liberty) of GDR citizens.

Fiduciary obligations form a sub-set of those primary obligations the breach of which constitutes a civil wrong. Only by starting from the obligation of the express trustee can one establish a clear picture of their content. ‘Fiduciary’ is one vehicle for exporting incidents of the express trust by analogy. The trustee's obligation differs from other primary obligations in the degree of altruism which it requires. The trustee must not only take care of the interests of another but must do so disinterestedly. This is the third and highest degree of legally obligatory altruism. The question then arises whether the trustee's obligation mutates when imposed on non-trustees. The core obligation never changes. A sub-problem then emerges: Can negligence be a breach of any one of three different primary duties and hence three different wrongs: breach of contract, tort, and breach of fiduciary duty? The last section of the lecture looks for the best way to dispel that illusion.

Israel's environmental problems have grown increasingly severe over the past decade, bringing contamination of the air and water to crisis levels and scarring a landscape that has particular historic and religious value internationally. A comprehensive report prepared by over 100 leading scientists and professionals about present environmental trends in the country was particularly discouraging. Israel's former Minister of Environment Rafael Eitan also began an international report about the country's environment with an unusually frank appraisal of the situation: Damage to natural and landscape resources, deteriorating air and groundwater contamination have reached a level where it “threatens to rob us and our children of our right to quality of life and the environment.”

The three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam — the subject matter of this survey — have several distinctive marks in common: they postulate the belief in and worship of God; they each have holy scriptures and other canonical texts and vest authoritative interpretations or applications thereof with binding force; each designates a class of officials or functionaries to preserve and propagate the faith; each seeks to imbue its religious, ethical and legal norms into the daily lives of individuals and communities; and none suffers dissidents from within. In addition there are, at least in Christianity and Islam, certain fundamental dogmata (for example, the Holy Trinity in Christianity, the divine prophecy of Muhammad in Islam) which everybody is duty-bound to believe. In each religion, ancient or medieval scholars of authority have compiled lists of articles of faith, the dissent from which by any individual coreligionist is proscribed. It will be shown that these lists are not necessarily exhaustive: the possibilities of dissidence are virtually unlimited.

The earliest political and legal documents inaugurating the era of constitutionalism in the late 18th century already emphasized the principles of liberty and equality. The first one, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, attributes the liberty and equality of human beings to the Creator, thus giving a religious explanation for its postulates. The second one, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, plainly states in its first article that humans are born and remain free and equal in rights, which are defined as natural rights serving the public good and thereby put in a more secular context, although the Déclaration also recognizes the presence and protection of the “Supreme Being”. Ever since, the religious and the secular explanations have been competing with and supplementing each other in ensuring the effective protection of human rights. And ever since, liberty and equality have been competing with and supplementing each other in keeping the proper balance between the interests of society and the aspirations of the individual.

Some thirty years after the Bergman decision, Israel's constitutional structure and legal culture are still not responsive to minority needs or, more broadly, to the social needs of deprived communities. The liberal language and judicial review of Knesset legislation that were empowered by Bergman have not reconciled this problematic discrepancy between jurisprudence and social needs.

The Bergman ruling signified the onset of a new era in Israel jurisprudence — the era of liberalism, in that it generated the notion of judicial counter-majoritarianism as the center, however problematic, of democracy. It was a modest ruling and a careful one, dwelling only on procedural deficiencies as cause for judicial abrogation of parliamentary legislation. Later on, after 1992, and propelled by the spirit of judicial activism, the Supreme Court adopted a more expansive judicial policy. It asserted the need for much more active judicial review of the substance of Knesset legislation and even the possibility of annulling it if it fell within the provisions of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom and the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation.

Although India and Israel differ dramatically in size, population, and affluence, there are many important similarities. Each is the contemporary vehicle of an old and resilient civilization that expresses a distinctive, influential and enduring arrangement of the various facets of human experience. Each of these cultures underwent a prolonged colonial experience in which its traditions were disrupted and subordinated to a hegemonic European Christian culture; each had an earlier experience with victorious, expansive Islam; each has reached an uneasy but flourishing accommodation with the secular, scientific modernity of the West.

In each case this was achieved by a movement that embraced “Enlightenment” values and in turn provoked a recoil from modernity/rediscovery of tradition. In each there is a conflict between those with “modern” secular views of civil society and those revivalists or fundamentalists who seek to restore an indigenous religiously based society. The secular nationalism that predominated in the struggle for independence and the formation of the state is now countered by powerful tides of fundamentalism.

In modern evidence theory two main theories of legal factfinding have emerged. One of these is the mathematical probabilistic approach, which claims that the universal rules of mathematics apply to legal factfinding as to any other rational decision-making. The opposite approach, of Tribe, Nesson and others, contests this view. Those opposing the mathematical theory have done so mostly on grounds of legal policy, which I shall not be concerned with. However, some of the sharpest criticism, at least from the point of view of the adherents of the mathematical explanation, has been of the soundness of the mathematical explanation. In certain instances typical to the legal process, the mathematical approach has been claimed to lead to absurd results which contradict common sense and legal doctrine.

In this paper I will claim that the rules of mathematical probability must apply to legal factfinding and if fallacies in its application are exposed, their existence must be due to error in the way in which the rules have been applied. I will argue and try to prove that the concept of relevance, an essential concept to any theory of legal factfinding, has been disregarded in mathematical probability theory.