I am very happy and very honoured to have been invited to give the inaugural lecture in the series under the Sir Hersch Lauterpacht Chair of Public International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is a great honour to be connected with the name of Hersch Lauterpacht who was one of the truly great minds in the field of international law in our epoch, great as a scholar, great as an idealist, an innovator and a prophet; and it is a source of happiness to me to bear witness to the fact that he was also a great human being whose wisdom was illuminated with kindness and warmth. His friends and pupils remember him with love and gratitude.

For the purpose of this paper I invite you to accept with me the proposition that we live in an ecological crisis. The extent of the dangers confronting us is in dispute. The degree of urgency is debated. There are still serious gaps in our knowledge. The task of the scientists is enormous. Still, no one can ignore the existence of this crisis.

“The two worlds of man, the biosphere of his inheritance, the technosphere of his creation—are out of balance, indeed potentially in deep conflict. And man is in the middle. This is the hinge of history at which we stand, the door of the future opening on to a crisis more sudden, more global, more inescapable and more bewildering than any ever encountered by the human species and one which will take decisive shape within the life span of children who are already born.”

It is difficult to see the connection between these two topics, but on 25 February 1975 the Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany gave a decision of great importance in both fields, and although Israel adheres to another system of law, in the opinion of the writer, this decision is of great interest here too.

The amendment of the German law relating to abortions, whose constitutionality was examined in the judgment mentioned, is part of a reform movement spreading from Europe to the Americas in the West and to Russia, India and Singapore in the East. It began to have influence upon legislation between the two wars (Russia 1920, Scandinavia and Switzerland in the 1930's), but gathered momentum particularly during the last decade (one of the earlier laws in this series is the English Abortion Act, 1967; one of the latest, the French Law of 17 January 1975).

In the absence of a written constitution in Israel, the protection of fundamental rights of the citizens depends upon a variety of legal sources. In the course of resolving questions concerning individual rights, the courts rely upon statutory law as well as basic principles of democratic government and concepts of individual freedoms as expressed in the Israel Declaration of Independence and in international covenants.

In the Draft Basic Law: Rights of the Man and the Citizen (hereinafter referred to as the Draft Basic Law), which has passed the first reading in the Knesset, the fundamental rights will be embodied into a written Basic Law. This Basic Law together with the Basic Laws already enacted and those in preparation will eventually become the Constitution of Israel. The chapter by chapter legislative policy for enacting Israel's Constitution was laid down in 1950 by the Knesset in what has become known as the Harari Resolution. In the last eight years the drive for legislating Basic Laws, i.e., the chapters of the future Constitution, has gained momentum. It is hoped, therefore, that the day when the State of Israel will have a Constitution is not very far off.

The Draft Basic Law extends its protection over the basic civil rights commonly recognized by civilized nations and their constitutions and by international covenants. But social rights, except for the freedom of workers to “associate in labour unions for the protection and furtherance of their economic and social interests”, which is explicitly provided, are not dealt with in the Draft Basic Law.

In 1903 when Dean Roscoe Pound, who was then Commissioner of the Supreme Court of Nebraska, decided that a corporation which was wholly owned by one stockholder could not sue the person from whom the present stockholder had purchased his stock, for mismanagement and waste allegedly committed before the purchase, he wrote: