Conference on the Israeli Civil Code

MPI für Privatrecht, Hamburg 22.01.2007

The work on the Israeli Civil Code is well under way. A draft developed under the leadership of the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak, was finished in 2004 and subsequently provided to the Israeli Ministry of Justice for further attention. It is expected that this revised draft will soon be presented for legislative consideration. Given this occasion, on 22 and 23 January 2007 the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg held a conference organised by Kurt Siehr and Reinhard Zimmermann which was attended by numerous scholars from Israel, Austria and Germany in addition to representatives from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Questions on consumer protection law, contractual interference, restitution, tort law, property law and limitation periods were discussed. As to each of these six fields of law, the principles, legal background and particular areas of dispute were presented by an Israeli jurist and then followed by a comparative law commentary by a speaker from Austria or Germany. 

Topics and Speakers:

Introduction to the Israeli Civil Code Proposal (Aharon Barak)

General Contract Law and Consumer Contract Law (Ofer Groskopf / Josef Drexl)

Remedies for Breach of Contract (Nili Cohen / Hans Christoph Grigoleit)

Law of Restitution (Daniel Friedmann / Christiane Wendehorst)

Tort Law (Izhak Englard / Helmut Koziol)

Codification, Coherence and Proprietary Competitions (Hanoch Dagan / Eva-Maria Kieninger)

Limitation of Actions (Israel Gilead / Reinhard Zimmermann)

A report on the conference will be released in the ZEuP; a volume containing the conference papers is under preparation.