Israeli law, the legal practices and institutions of modern Israel. In ancient times, when the people of Israel lived in their homeland, they created their own law: the law of the Torah and the law of the Mishna and the Talmud (see Torah; Mishna). Then came the separation of land and people for more than 1,800 years. The law left the land together with those who had created it, and the land acquired other laws, changing from time to time with the change of consecutive conquerors. The Jews took their law with them wherever they went, continued to develop it, and submitted to it wherever their communities enjoyed any measure of autonomy. When the Jews thus eventually returned to their ancient land in the 20th century, they brought back with them a dual legal heritage: that of the historic Jewish law and that of the laws of the countries in which they had been living.
When Israel’s independence was proclaimed in 1948, some of the Ottoman enactments and much law of English origin continued to be applied, but English ceased to be the predominant legal language and was immediately replaced by Hebrew. The law was thenceforth made by the democratic authorities of the autonomous state of Israel, which, in spite of an Arab minority, became Jewish in conception, way of thinking, and purpose.
Israeli courts are composed of professional judges only, the jury being unknown. Secular courts are organized on three levels: magistrate’s courts, dealing with certain civil matters and offenses punishable with imprisonment up to three years; district courts in the four principal cities, with general jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters; and the supreme court in Jerusalem, deciding appeals from inferior courts and exercising, as court of first and only instance, jurisdiction as high court of justice. Religious courts continue to be competent in matters of personal status, with some minor changes in the scope of jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts.
In administrative law, legislation covers most subjects with which the legislature of a modern welfare state is concerned, including education, compulsory military service (for men and women), and national insurance. Particularly important for the economy of the country are the water law and the law on the encouragement of capital investments, both of 1959. Laws dealing with collective bargaining, labour exchanges, protection of wages, safety regulations, severance payment, and so on, are the nucleus of a code of labour law.
Developments in criminal law, torts, and evidence have been confined to piecemeal amendments of the pre-1948 law. Significant among these are the abolition of the death penalty for murder and the introduction of suspended prison sentences; a new way of taking evidence of minors in trials of sexual offenses; and liability of the state in torts. The rules of criminal procedure were consolidated in 1965: among other changes, preliminary inquiry was abolished; the civil procedure rules, mainly derived from their English counterpart, were also redrafted and revised.
In private law Israeli legislation includes a law on women’s equal rights; laws dealing with capacity and guardianship, adoption, and duties of maintenance between relatives; a law on the tenure of cooperative houses with separate ownership of flats; a standard contracts law; a comprehensive law of succession; laws on agency, guarantee, mortgage, and bailment; a defamation law and a patents law.
Jewish law as such continues to be applied by the rabbinical courts within their jurisdiction in matters of personal status; it is applied also by the civil courts when called upon to deal with such matters concerning Jews. In other fields of law it is not applied as the law of the land. It serves, however, as an important source for the shaping of new rules of law, both by the Knesset (parliament) and in the creative decisions of the courts.