I am deeply appreciative of the honour you have done me in inviting me to deliver this lecture. It is an especial privilege to speak under the auspices of Dean Reuven Yaron, to whom I am tied by a friendship of many years and from whom, like many of you, I have learned a great deal. I am very grateful for his generous introduction: you will know him well enough to make the necessary allowances.

The subject of this evening is so wide that only a few selected items can be discussed; and inevitably some of you who would have preferred a different choice will be disappointed. Let me say at once that I shall not go into autopsy, however burning an issue it is at the moment in this country. The reason is simple: I have already written on it and do not wish to repeat myself. I shall open by some comments on a recent debate in Britain. Then I shall come to my principal topic, experimentation. This may be of interest to you at a moment when you are, happily, about to start a School of Pharmacology which will no doubt have to think about such matters. Finally I shall explore a much neglected, almost repressed aspect of the march of medicine—if you like, a variation on the old folk theme “out of sight, out of mind”.

Can the registered owner of a trademark object to the use of his mark on goods on which the same trademark has been legally affixed abroad, but which have been imported into this country without his consent and against his wishes through what may be termed “irregular channels”, i.e., not through the agent, licensee or subsidiary of the trademark proprietor?

This question of apparently minor importance has lately come to the forefront of interest in professional circles. The intensification of international trade since the end of World War II, the lowering of tariffs, the creation of supra-national economic units such as EEC and EFTA, and the growing number of international firms and concerns with the consequent establishment of sales organizations abroad have brought this question in different sets of circumstances before the courts of many countries. Their decisions have been widely divergent, from country to country, and sometimes even within the same country; many of them have been attacked in textbooks and legal periodicals; their reasoning, even where the results have been accepted, has been criticized and new doctrines have been proposed. In 1967, the International Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (AIPPI), with a view to unifying trademark law, initiated an extensive study of this question, but has so far failed to arrive at a generally acceptable solution.

The lengthy report in Genesis 23 of the negotiations and subsequent purchase of the cave and field of Machpelah is problematic from the legal point of view. On the face of it, Abraham obstinately insists on paying for what the Bnei Heth and Ephron wish to give him free. If one is not to dismiss the bulk of the report as niceties of oriental bargaining, as do most non-legal commentators, then complex problems of relating the transaction to the provisions of a coherent legal system arise. For this reason it is impossible entirely to separate the question of the legal source of this passage from the problems of its content. Consequently the first section on material legal problems of the text includes a consideration of some of the possible sources, while those relating to aspects of form alone are treated separately.

Assuming the legal background to be that of Jewish law, Melamed interprets the transaction as a gift-transaction, not by the Bnei Heth, but also by Abraham. The problem is that Abraham being a “stranger and sojourner”, as he declares in v. 4, he is unable to buy land for burial. In order to avoid this prohibition, the transaction takes the form of mutual gifts. But if all that is needed is a gift in order to make his acquisition possible, it seems strange that Abraham refuses Ephron's offer in v. 11 and insists on giving money in return, which looks suspiciously like an offer to purchase. Melamed proposes, therefore, that Abraham did not in fact want to receive a real gift, because he feared that the giver meant a matana 'al menat lěhahzir (gift made on condition that it be returned—cf. Succa 41b); he thus in v. 13 requests Ephron to take his money first, and only afterwards will he bury his dead. However, the Talmudic matana 'al menat lěhahzir is a subtle concept, the product of a well-developed legal system, and it is difficult to relate it to the presumably quite primitive legal system of the patriarchs.

A fundamental problem in jurisprudence—the justification of subjection to law, the legitimation of the demand to account for one's deeds—is antecedent to the science of law. In furnishing a solution to this problem philosophy shapes qualitatively the nature of the legal order of a society which it underlies. In what follows we shall focus our attention on two outstanding achievements of European civilization in antiquity—attempt to state Aristotle's solution of the problem and point to its counterparts in Roman jurisprudence.

It should be noted that Aristotle's views, including his theory of responsibility, underwent certain developments. We shall, however, discuss it in its mature shape in the Nicomachean Ethics. As for Roman law, from the Twelve Tables in the 5th century B.C. down to Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis in the 6th century A.D., and thereafter, it was never a static body of law. Yet the Corpus is its best known and most widely applied embodiment. It has exerted influence on later European legal thought long after the Roman Empire ceased to exist and inspired many systems of law throughout the world. We shall, therefore, discuss Roman law as it is reflected in that compilation.

A.Brief Factual Background: It is not proposed here to unfold the entire history of the Arab-Israel conflict. Our purpose is rather to outline briefly the major, and by and large undisputed, events preceding the outburst of all-out hostilities on the morning of June 5, 1967.

In the aftermath of the first Arab-Israel war, in 1949, Israel and the surrounding Arab countries signed armistice agreements, according to which all hostile military activities between the signing parties were to cease. However, throughout the years following the signing of the agreements, innumerable border incidents, military or semi-military raids and reprisals, sabotage and mining operations, and other belligerent actions occurred, each side charging the other with aggression. In May 1948, Egypt closed the Suez Canal to passage by Israeli shipping and, at the end of 1949, installed guns at Sharm-el-Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran, thus blockading the Israeli port of Eilat. To justify her actions, Egypt persistently asserted the existence of a “state of war” or “state of belligerency” between Israel and herself, irrespective of the armistice agreement and her obligations under the United Nations Charter. In October 1956, the second Arab-Israel war, known as the Suez (or Sinai) Campaign, broke out. But even this violent confrontation and the arrangements which followed, including the stationing of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) in the Gaza Strip and Sharm el-Sheikh, did not bring about stability and peace. Tension continued to mount in the area.