The rules of criminal law that govern participation in crime often include special provisions with regard to accomplice liability for the commission of collateral offenses by the principal in the course of the unlawful undertaking. While some Anglo-American jurisdictions limit accomplice liability to cases where the commission of the collateral offense is effectively contemplated by the participant, other jurisdictions, including Israel, also provide for punishment of the participant where the collateral offense is reasonably foreseeable. Accordingly, participants are held liable for crimes that are perpetrated incidentally to the commission of the projected crime, on the basis of an objective, rather than subjective, foresight standard. Whether this deviation from the prevalent paradigm of accomplice liability is justified in principle and policy constitutes the main focus of this article.

The German Democratic Republic's practice of firing upon ist own citizens is well-known. The question arises whether acts which were exempt from punishment in the GDR can be punished today in reunified Germany? The West German Constitution expresses the notion that retroactive effect of penal laws is prohibited. However, the German Courts, above the Federal Constitutional Court (decision of 24/10/1996) have affirmed the criminal liability of East German border guards based on G. Radbruch's “natural law doctrine.”

As a conclusion, it becomes clear that the illegality of acts of Berlin Wall guards can only be derived by following either the Federal Constitutional Court's natural law strategy or the strategy of a strict Statutory Positivism (Gesetzespositivismus); since it can be shown that official instructions and orders to shoot were not permissible beneath the level of constitutional provisions, normal statutes or regulations justifiy restrictions on the human dignity and integrity (in particular the right to life and liberty) of GDR citizens.

Israel's environmental problems have grown increasingly severe over the past decade, bringing contamination of the air and water to crisis levels and scarring a landscape that has particular historic and religious value internationally. A comprehensive report prepared by over 100 leading scientists and professionals about present environmental trends in the country was particularly discouraging. Israel's former Minister of Environment Rafael Eitan also began an international report about the country's environment with an unusually frank appraisal of the situation: Damage to natural and landscape resources, deteriorating air and groundwater contamination have reached a level where it “threatens to rob us and our children of our right to quality of life and the environment.”

Some thirty years after the Bergman decision, Israel's constitutional structure and legal culture are still not responsive to minority needs or, more broadly, to the social needs of deprived communities. The liberal language and judicial review of Knesset legislation that were empowered by Bergman have not reconciled this problematic discrepancy between jurisprudence and social needs.

The Bergman ruling signified the onset of a new era in Israel jurisprudence — the era of liberalism, in that it generated the notion of judicial counter-majoritarianism as the center, however problematic, of democracy. It was a modest ruling and a careful one, dwelling only on procedural deficiencies as cause for judicial abrogation of parliamentary legislation. Later on, after 1992, and propelled by the spirit of judicial activism, the Supreme Court adopted a more expansive judicial policy. It asserted the need for much more active judicial review of the substance of Knesset legislation and even the possibility of annulling it if it fell within the provisions of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom and the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation.