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Aharon Barak
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Aharon Barak (birth name Arik Brick, born September 16, 1936) is a professor of law at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and a lecturer in law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a lecturer in law at the Yale Law School and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
Aharon Barak 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."
k was born in Kaunas, Lithuania.
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Encyclopedia
Aharon Barak (birth name Arik Brick, born September 16, 1936) is a professor of law at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and a lecturer in law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a lecturer in law at the Yale Law School and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
Aharon Barak 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."
Biography
Barak was born in Kaunas, Lithuania. He spent three years in the Kovno Ghetto with his parents, before being smuggled out in a sack at the age of five. In 1947, after wandering through postwar Europe, the family immigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood. Barak is married to Elisheva and they have four children.
Legal career
Barak championed 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 because of this.
As Attorney General, Barak was a key member of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's team of negotiators for the Camp David Accords according to Jimmy Carter, along with Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman. Barak was appointed to the Supreme Court at the age of 43 after being the most powerful attorney general in the history of Israel. He retired in 2006 after 28 years in the Supreme Court, during which he expanded the powers of the court and reshaped Israel as a constitutional democracy. . Barak is a secular Jew but believes in compromise with the religious sector and state support for religion. While some have called him a post-Zionist, he describes himself as a Zionist who believes in a Jewish nation-state.
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.
Barak received Honorary Degrees from Brandeis University in 2003 and Columbia University in 2007.
Quotations
On balancing individual rights and security, from his opinion written for a September 6, 1999 decision of the Supreme Court of Israel:
"This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it and not all practices employed by its enemies are
open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.
Preserving the rule of law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding
of security. At the end of the day they strengthen its spirit and allow it to overcome its difficulties."
External links
- (Princeton University Press, 2006)
- , a book review by Robert Bork of The Judge in a Democracy.
- , a book review by Richard Posner of The Judge in a Democracy.
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