When the State of Israel was established in 1948, the young State inherited, along with a host of political, military and economic problems, also a jigsaw puzzle legal situation, One of the first enactments passed by the young State was to accept en bloc the laws and ordinances which had been in force on the eve of its proclamation, save for such statutory instruments which were repugnant to the letter and spirit of its establishment, such as the laws which forbade the immigration of Jews to what used to be Palestine.

As far as the civil, commercial and maritime law was concerned, the situation was little short of bizarre—a mixture of Turkish and English laws, which were in force either on the eve of the British Mandate for Palestine at the termination of the 1914-18 world war, intertwined with gradual British Mandatory Ordinances and Regulations, and capped by what was defined by the Order in Council, 1936, as

“the substance of the Common Law and the Doctrines of Equity in force in England … provided always that the said Common Law and Doctrines of Equity shall be in force in Palestine so far only as the circumstances of Palestine and its inhabitants and the limit of His Majesty’s jurisdiction permit, and subject to such qualification as local circumstances render necessary.”1

Although by virtue of the limitations imposed upon the power of reception of British common law and equity cited above, English legal concepts and precedents were slow to gain recognition during the first years of the British Mandate. This process was materially accelerated from 1936 onwards, so that at the inception of the Israel independence, British precedents were liberally quoted and pleaded in all courts, and the new State did not show any hesitancy in continuing to adopt these measures, notwithstanding a vigorous effort to replace the old, partly derelict, and crumbling structure of legal norms precariously perched on irrational posts of strange and often contradictory columns and spires.

This process of lawgiving was particularly salient in the field of civil and commercial law, although, save for a few and comparatively immaterial laws in the field of maritime law, the previously existing position is still valid, and an anomaly in this domain is the fact that, for instance, the Admiralty jurisdiction in Israel is still founded along the elsewhere extinct Admiralty Court Acts of 1840 and 1861, and the Vice-Admiralty Rules 1883, proclaimed applicable in what then was Palestine by virtue of the Palestine Admiralty Jurisdiction Order 19372.

Obviously, the limits of a brief article of this nature preclude the possibility of going in depth into any details: I shall only review the headlines of new legislation in the civil and commercial field, and comment briefly on the value of precedent and the development of jurisprudence on these subjects.

Instead of the antiquated Ottoman laws on these subjects, the following were covered by new Israeli legislation, partly introducing new ideas and normative