Aharon Barak

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Aharon Barak
President of the Supreme Court of Israel
In office
13 August 1995 – 14 September 2006
Preceded byMeir Shamgar
Succeeded byDorit Beinisch
Personal details
Born (1936-09-16) 16 September 1936 (age 87)
Kaunas, Lithuania
NationalityIsraeli
SpouseElisheva Barak-Ussoskin
Children4
Parent(s)Zvi Brick, Leah Brick
Alma materHebrew University of Jerusalem

Aharon Barak (Hebrew: אהרן ברק; born 16 September 1936) is an Israeli lawyer and jurist who served as President of the Supreme Court of Israel from 1995 to 2006. Prior to this, Barak served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel from 1978 to 1995, and before this as Attorney General of Israel from 1975 to 1978.

Barak was born with the name of Erik Brick in

Israeli military
.

From 1974 to 1975, Barak was dean of the law faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[1] Barak is currently a law professor at Reichman University in Herzliya, and has taught at institutions including Yale Law School, Central European University, Georgetown University Law Center, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

Biography

Erik Brick (later Aharon Barak) was born in

Kovno ghetto. In an interview with HaOlam HaZeh, Barak told how a Lithuanian farmer saved his life by hiding him under a load of potatoes and smuggling him out of the ghetto, thereby risking his own life if caught.[2] At the end of the war, after wandering through Hungary, Austria, and Italy, Barak and his parents reached Rome, where they spent the next two years. In 1947, they received travel papers and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. After a brief period in a moshav, the family settled in Jerusalem.[citation needed
]

He studied law,

Holocaust survivor, preferred not to be involved in the work. At his request, he was transferred to the State Attorney
's office to complete his internship. Upon completing his internship he was recognised as a certified attorney.

Barak is married to Elisheva Barak-Ussoskin, former vice president of the National Labor Court, with whom he has three daughters and a son, all trained in the law.[citation needed] Barak's son-in-law Ram Landes made a one-hour documentary film about Barak in 2009 called The Judge (השופט‎), based on an in-depth interview with Barak.

Academic career

Between 1966 and 1967 Barak studied at Harvard University. In 1968 he was appointed as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 1974 was named the dean of its law faculty. In 1975, at age 38, he was awarded the Israel Prize for legal research. In the same year he became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 1978 he became a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After his retirement from the Supreme Court, Barak joined the staff of the Reichman University in Herzliya, and he teaches in the master's degree program for Commercial Law. He also lectures in the Bachelor of Laws program. In addition, he continues to lecture at both the Yale Law School and the University of Alabama in the United States, as well as lecturing as a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

Judicial career

Attorney General of Israel

Between 1975 and 1978, Barak served as the Attorney General of Israel. Among his well-known decisions in this capacity were:

Ezer Weizmann
, 1978

Barak was appointed by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 as the legal advisor to the Israeli delegation for negotiating the Camp David Accords. In his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter praises Barak as a negotiator despite the political disagreements between them.[3]

Supreme Court of Israel

On 22 September 1978, Barak began his service as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel – the youngest of all of the judges. In 1982–83 he served as a member of the Kahan Commission, a state investigation committee formed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Sabra and Shatila massacre. As part of the committee's conclusions, then Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon was removed from his position. The committee further recommended that he never be appointed to that position again in the future. In 1993, with the retirement of the Deputy President of the Supreme Court Menachem Elon, Barak was appointed the Deputy President. Subsequently, with the retirement of the President Meir Shamgar on 13 August 1995, Barak was appointed the President of the Supreme Court.

In the course of his service on the Supreme Court, Barak greatly expanded the range of issues with which the court dealt.[4] He canceled the standing test which Israel's Supreme Court had used frequently, and greatly expanded the scope of justiciability by allowing petitions on a range of matters. Professor Daphna Barak-Erez commented that:"One of the most significant impacts of Judge Barak on Israeli law is found in the change which he led with regard to all matters of justiciability. Judge Barak was the instigator and leader of the outlook which regards the traditional doctrine of justiciability as inappropriately and unnecessarily limiting the matters which the court deals with. Under the leadership of Judge Barak, the Supreme Court significantly increased the [range of] fields in which it is [willing to intervene]."[5]

Simultaneously, he advanced a number of standards, both for public administration (mainly, the standard of the reasonableness of the administrative decision) and in the private sector (the standard of good faith), while blurring the distinction between the two. Barak's critics have argued that, in doing so, the Supreme Court under his leadership harmed judicial consistency and stability, particularly in the private sector.[6]

After 1992, much of his judicial work was focused on advancing and shaping Israel's

parliamentary democracy to a constitutional parliamentary democracy, in that its Basic Laws were to be interpreted as its constitution.[7]

During his time as President of the Supreme Court, Barak advanced a

judicial activist approach, whereby the court was not required to limit itself to judicial interpretation, but rather was permitted to fill the gaps in the law through judicial legislation at common law
. This approach was highly controversial and was met with much opposition, including by some politicians. The Israeli legal commentator Ze'ev Segal wrote in a 2004 article, "Barak sees the Supreme Court as a [force for societal change], far beyond the primary role as a decisor in disputes. The Supreme Court under his leadership is fulfilling a central role in the shaping of Israeli law, not much less than [the role of] the Knesset. Barak is the leading power in the court, as a key judge in it for a quarter of a century, and as the number 1 judge for some 10 years now."

On 14 September 2006, upon reaching the mandatory age, Barak retired from the Supreme Court. Three months later he published his final judgments, among them a number of

precedents regarding damages in tort for residents of the Palestinian territories, Israel's policy of targeted killing
, and preferential treatment for IDF veterans.

Parallel to his service in the Supreme Court, Barak also served as the head of a committee which, for some twenty years, drafted the Israeli Civil Codex, which worked to unite the 24 main civil law statutes in Israeli law under a single comprehensive law.

Selected judgments

Barak's portrait at Supreme Court of Israel

South Africa v. Israel

On January 11, 2024, the Israeli government appointed Barak as an ad hoc judge to serve on the International Court of Justice case South Africa v. Israel, brought against Israel by South Africa on charges of genocide. [8]

Views and opinions

Barak championed a proactive judiciary that has interpreted Israel's Basic Law as its constitution, and challenged Knesset laws on that basis. Barak's legal philosophy starts with the belief that "the world is filled with law". This idea portrays law as an all-encompassing framework of human affairs from which no action can ever be immune: Whatever the law does not prohibit, it permits; either way, the law always has its say, on everything.[9] Following his retirement from the Supreme Court, the new President of the Court, Judge Dorit Beinisch, said at his farewell ceremony: "At the heart of the development of the law of Israel stands Aharon Barak. He opened new horizons. The law as it stands after his [Presidency] differs in its purpose from the era which preceded him. Since his first year in the Supreme Court his rulings were groundbreaking, since '78 and until today he set the central legal norms that this court granted Israeli society."

On the issue of the substantial expansion of the right of standing and the test of reasonableness of an administrative decision (which grants the courts the power to overrule an administrative decision if the judge is convinced that it does not "stand [within the] bounds of reasonableness"), Amnon Rubinstein wrote:" Thus a situation has arisen whereby the Supreme Court may convene and decide on every conceivable issue. In addition to that the unreasonableness of an administrative decision will be grounds for judicial intervention. This was a total revolution in the judicial thinking which characterized the Supreme Court of previous generations, and this has given it the reputation of the most activist court in the world, causing both admiration and criticism. In practice, in many respects the Supreme Court under Barak has become an alternate government."

Barak is a secular Jew but believes in compromise with the religious sector, and state support for religion.[

Haredim and Religious Zionists) held a mass protest against the Supreme Court under his presidency, after the Supreme Court ruled that in cases of divorce the Israeli religious courts of law are required to decide property disputes according to the law of the Knesset rather than according to the Halakha.[citation needed
]

Criticism

Among critics of Barak's judicial activism are former President of the Supreme Court of Israel

Nobel prize for law, Barak would likely be among its early recipients.[10]

His judgments on matters of security have been subject to criticism by some on both the left and the right.[11][12][13][vague]

Key legal doctrines

Awards and recognition

Published works

  • Judicial Discretion (1989)
  • Purposive Interpretation in Law (2005)
  • The Judge in a Democracy (2006)
  • Begin and the Rule of Law, Israel Studies, Indiana University Press, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2005, pp. 1–28

See also

References

  1. ^ "Aharon Barak – President of the Supreme Court". Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 21 January 2010.
  2. ^ Avnery, Uri (18 April 2015). "There Are Still Judges…". Gush Shalom. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  3. ^ .
  4. ^ Neuer, Hillel (1998). "Aharon Barak's Revolution". Azure. Winter 5758 (3). Retrieved 24 January 2011.mirror Archived 1 May 2009 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 29 October 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  6. ^ "השופט כבוחן כליות ולב". Makorrishon.co.il. Archived from the original on 13 March 2007. Retrieved 22 September 2010.
  7. ^ פרוטוקול:208 – חוקה בהסכמה רחבה (in Hebrew). Huka.gov.il. Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 22 September 2010.
  8. ^ Berman, Lazar; Horowitz, Michael; Sharon, Jeremy (7 January 2024). "Israel tasks ex-Supreme Court chief Aharon Barak to serve at Hague genocide hearings". Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  9. ^ Aharon Barak's revolution Archived 1 May 2009 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ a b c d e f g Posner, Richard A. (23 April 2007). "Enlightened Despot". The New Republic. Retrieved 21 January 2010.
  11. ^ "ערוץ 7 - רשת תקשורת ישראלית". Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 29 October 2009.
  12. ^ "אצלי זה פוליטי, נקודה – מוסף הארץ – הארץ". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 5 June 2011. Retrieved 22 September 2010.
  13. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 1 November 2009. Retrieved 29 October 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  14. ^ Aharon Barak on the Role of Proportionality Archived 26 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine (Foundation for Law, Justice and Society Annual Lecture 2009)
  15. ^ "Israel Prize Official Site – Recipients in 1975 (in Hebrew)".
  16. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 17 May 2011.
  17. ^ "2006 Gruber Justice Prize Press Release". Retrieved 21 January 2010.
  18. ^ Kahn, Ronald (September 2006). "PURPOSIVE INTERPRETATION IN LAW, by Aharon Barak". Law and Politics Book Review. 16 (9): 708–738. Archived from the original on 6 December 2010.

External links