Inheritance from Uncle Sam: the American influence on Israeli succession law

The Israeli Succession Bill was the first civil law to be written in the young State of Israel. With the help of extensive archival research, in Israel and the United States, this article follows one of the factors in the formulation of the bill. This is the project for assisting Israeli law established at the beginning of the 1950s at Harvard Law School. Study of the archives showed how deep the involvement of the project workers, and of leading American jurists, was in the shaping of the bill. Many existing sections in the law have their origins in the comments that arrived from the United States, behind which one can see the influence of American law. The article also tries to understand why the authorities in Israel tried to hide the American involvement in the writing of the bill, as well as the motivation of the American jurists in assisting in the writing of it.