The subject upon which I have been invited to address you is a gloomy one. There is little pleasure to the speaker in recounting a catalogue of failures. The hope is that you may be able at the end to say “Thank goodness we have done better than the British”, or even, perhaps, “The British have made that mistake, we can avoid it”. In other words, a free and candid exchange of views never does any harm.

Thirty-five years ago were stirring times for Israel. For us too, in Great Britain, in a more mundane way. Some of us were exchanging flying helmets for barristers wigs. There was new hope in the air. Social injustice would be a thing of the past. No one would go hungry. No one would go short of medical attention through lack of money, involuntary unemployment would no longer mean that a man's family would go short of food and the other necessities of life.

The enactment of the Trust Law, 1979, not only introduced the institution of trusts into Israeli law with complete and final validity, but it also focussed current legal attention on the primary duty derived from the function of the trustee, i.e. the duty to act loyally. The word “trust” denotes the institution, but it is also an expression of the nature of the relationship between trustee and beneficiary: a personal relationship based on mutual trust. The obligation to act loyally, which will henceforth be called the “fiduciary obligation” arose from the English institution of trusts, but was not confined by its bounds. It spread to a variety of relationships to which English law applied “fortified” norms, more demanding and more strict than those prevailing in the regular course of commerce.

The Penal Law, 1977, enumerates no less the sixteen offences containing, in one form or another, the element of threat.

Sometimes, threat is the only form taken by the behavioural element of the actus reus, but frequently it appears as an alternative to the use of force or to other forms of behaviour, such as fraud.

The reason for the multitude of offences of threat is primarily historical, and to a certain extent, the lack of methodical thought in this area.

It would seem to us that the legislator, the courts and scholars who deal with offences of threat must clarify their own basic concepts and must be aware of decisions on the questions of policy confronting them: this would result in an elimination of the duplication, the disappearance of superfluous offences from the law books, and would prevent the confusion sometimes reigning in this area at present.