From the first, when human beings started to communicate with each other, information carried a message. The Information Society was born as soon as the first human creatures exchanged information.

Over history, information, like everything else, has developed and changed character. Information still carried a message, but rather quickly it must have also become power. When Francis Bacon coined the expression “Knowledge is power”, at the end of the 16th century, it had already been a truth for millions of years. Knowledge postulates information.

The Contracts (General Part) Law, 1973, is the fundamental statute in Israeli contract law, and will in the future serve as the basis for the codification of Israel civil law. The Law was enacted following a decade of meticulous preparatory work by a committee headed by Professor Tedeschi. Prof. Tedeschi was the leading intellectual force in this committee; his influence is apparent in the approaches, principles and concepts of the Law, as well as in its particular provisions. Prof. Tedeschi also devoted a part of his prolific writings to the realm of contracts law. This article, dealing with only two sections of the wide-ranging Contracts (General Part) Law, is dedicated with admiration to the father of Israeli modern contract law.

It is an indisputable fact that since the 1950's, the computer has assumed so central a place in our society that it is already difficult to visualize our society living and functioning without its assistance. And from the earliest period of the computer's development, it has been clear that this major addition to our society presents the legal world with new legal problems. Another aspect of this phenomenon is that as it became increasingly clear that the legal world was going to have to cope with these new problems, our legal community tended to produce more questions than answers.

Thirty-three states have enacted statutes that encompass in some way what is referred to in this paper as “computer crime”. In some states, computer crime laws are referred to as such only because of the inclusion of the word computer in some general provision. In others, complex and specific statutes exist.

Each of the computer crime state statutes presently in effect has its own peculiar combination of a variety of possible offenses. The bulk of the statutes proscribe as computer crime a core set of activities such as accessing, altering, damaging or destroying a computer with the intent to devise or execute any scheme or artifice to defraud or deceive. This “computer crime”, and a few others to be outlined later, are found in a majority of the state statutes with some individual variations. This paper presents a list of computer crimes common to many of the statutes, describes variations in those crimes and examines in more detail the unusual crimes.

This article is based on a study on custom in public law conducted some years ago due to the welcome initiative of Prof. G. Tedeschi. Like many others, I too responded to his irresistible powers of persuasion, to conduct a study on custom in a field close to my area of interest, public law. I owe many thanks to Prof. Tedeschi, for by virtue of this study I have acquired significant perspectives for the analysis of public law.

During the course of my work on another study (on judicial independence, conducted for the Jerusalem Institute for the Study of Israel), I discovered an historical document pertaining to Prof. Tedeschi, in whose honour this issue of the Israel Law Review appears. The document concerns an offer, addressed to Prof. Tedeschi in 1953, to be appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court.

In the name of all those who had the privilege to listen to today's enlightening lectures and discussion, I should like to express our gratitude both to our guests from abroad and to the Israeli participants for their valuable contribution to the illumination of problems connected with the relationship between computerized data-collecting and the law. As was stressed by Chief Justice Shamgar, Erwin Shimron was very much interested in questions of mutual interaction between the progress of social life and legal development. May I, as a retired teacher of constitutional law, ask your permission to refer briefly, in these concluding remarks, to the crucial issue of the protection of privacy in the computer age.

The need to protect privacy is deeply rooted in the respect for human dignity, the highest and most fundamental of all values in the civilized world. Considering then the close link between the private sphere of the individual and the very essence of human dignity, we have to attach the greatest importance to the task of protecting the private sphere in the relationship between State and individual and among individuals themselves.

It is generally thought that the rule of religious law regarding marriage and divorce is a concession on the part of the State of Israel to religious interests. It is assumed that the religious population derives great satisfaction from the fact that the State ostensibly bows down to religious law, declining to exercise its jurisdiction on this matter. The non-observant citizen is widely considered the victim of this arrangement. He is forced to take part in a religious ceremony which is foreign to him and, in such an intimate realm of his life, must render himself of the services of a religious authority that represents concepts and symbols which he adamantly rejects. It is true that this sensitivity to “religious coercion” and freedom of conscience is apparent as regards the Jewish population, whereas there is less of a tendency to increase government intervention in the religious and legal autonomy of non-Jewish religious communities.

Historical developments have left a greater impression on the law of property than on many other branches of law. Land law, which constitutes a substantial portion of the law of property, is of particular import in this regard. The characteristic feature of land is its permanence, which is manifested in place, time and quantity: place – land being immovable; time – land having a continuous existence; and quantity – the amount of land basically not changing. This threefold permanence exposes land law to the continuous influence of historical forces, the effects of which are lasting. The phenomenon can be observed in the legal systems of many countries, including Israel.