The following remarks do not constitute a detailed legal commentary on the 29 September 1988 Award delivered by the Arbitration Tribunal, which was established to resolve the dispute between Egypt and Israel regarding the Sinai frontier, particularly in the region of Taba. These remarks do not relate to the origin of the dispute or address the political context in which the arbitration took place. Nor do they dwell on the innovation of introducing, through the Compromis, a conciliation procedure entrusted to a Chamber of the Tribunal in the very midst of the arbitration proceedings. Still less do they make a detailed analysis of the claims of the two parties or of the Tribunal's opinion on each point in dispute. Leaving aside numerous other interesting aspects of the case, the modest purpose of these observations is to shed light on the originality of the position adopted by the Award in two aspects relating to the judicial function in border conflicts. When one considers the place occupied by this type of conflict in judicial disputes and in international arbitration, the interest which this Award deserves, beyond the specific circumstances which generated it, is obvious.

Adoption creates a familial relationship of parent and child between people who are not naturally related. In the ancient world, the institution of adoption served as a means of satisfying the need for family continuity, whether for religious-ritual purposes or for practical purposes, to produce an heir capable of inheriting the family property. To this day, several legal systems exist which allow adoption of adults in order to grant an adopter the right to appoint an heir. Such a right is important in those legal systems – which does not include the Israeli system – in which a person's right to make testamentary dispositions is limited. The testator who may not bequeath his property to a stranger as he wishes may overcome this limitation by adopting that stranger and thus making him a relative.

There is evidence, in some recent legal thinking on the employment contract, of a readiness to abandon classical contract principles. This phenomenon is especially apparent in the formulation of the Employment Contract Bill, 1985. In this article, I shall examine this development in the framework of an analysis of the employment relationship and the extent to which it is to be regarded as a contractual relationship, both under differing theoretical approaches and under existing labour law principles.

The contemporary employment relationship emerges from a contractual undertaking between individuals to exchange wages for services, but its social significance is not limited to the issues raised by the terms of the contract.