Aharon Barak's Agenda

For sheer, unmitigated hypocrisy, it would be hard to beat Supreme Court President Aharon Barak's justification for opposing Prof. Ruth Gavison's Supreme Court nomination. In a lecture last Friday, Barak said that while Gavison is "completely qualified" for the post, he objects to her because "she comes to the Supreme Court with an agenda"....it is particularly egregious coming from a man who has systematically made the court a vehicle for his own agenda....the court should be the arbiter of every major political and social issue....Moreover, as he wrote in another article, the court must decide such issues "according to the views of the enlightened community in Israel" - where the justices, of course, are the arbiters of what qualifies as "enlightened." In other words, Supreme Court justices are the modern equivalent of Plato's philosopher king: Their job is to impose their own "enlightened" views on the nation.

To put this agenda into practice, Barak persuaded his colleagues on the bench to eliminate two procedural barriers to judicial intervention that had been in place since the court's establishment, and are still in place in most other Western countries.

One, the doctrine of "standing," held that only someone with a direct, personal interest in a case could petition the court on that issue. Barak decided instead that anyone could petition the court on any issue, thereby ensuring that someone could always be found to bring every major issue to the court's doorstep. The second, the doctrine of "justiciability," held that the court should not rule on certain issues because they are properly the purview of the legislature or executive. Barak held instead that since "no areas in life? are outside the law," no issue can be beyond the court's purview....The fact that no other country in the world has ever adopted a constitution by minority vote troubled Barak not at all. Neither did the fact that most MKs did not intend these laws as constitutional legislation (as Barak himself admitted, Israel's "constitution" came into being "almost secretly").