Aharon Barak (b. Kaunas, Lithuania on September 16, 1936) is a professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lecturer in law at the Yale Law School. He was President of the Supreme Court of Israel from 1995 until the middle of 2006. Legal scholars have called him the “John Marshall” of Israel, the “world’s greatest living jurist.”[1]
He was smuggled out of the Kovno Ghetto in a suitcase as a child and hidden by a Lithuanian farmer. He immigrated to Israel with his parents in 1947.
Barak is well-known for championing a proactive judiciary that has interpreted Israel’s Basic Law as its constitution and challenged Knesset laws on that basis; his actions have been controversial in some quarters because of this. Under his term the Supreme Court issued controversial decisions on the nature of the state and the ability of both the Knesset and the Prime Minister to implement their decisions. Barak reached mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2006, leaving the Israeli Supreme Court a very different place.
In 2006, he published “The Judge in a Democracy”, an examination of his judicial philosophy, in which he describes the role of a judge, beyond dispute resolution, is to connect law with society and to protect the constitution and democracy. He also espouses the role of purposive interpretation to reading constitutional texts.
He received an Honorary Degree from Columbia University in 2007.
Taken by Kobi Kalmanovitz for the EMET Prize 2007 Catalogue in the library of the Supreme Court of Israel on Wednesday 25.07.2007
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