Welcome to SCOTUSblog’s recurring series in which we interview experts on different supreme courts around the world and how they compare with our own. Today’s column focuses on the Supreme Court of Israel. To help me comprehend this institution, I corresponded with law professor Keren Weinshall.
When was the Supreme Court of Israel established?
The Supreme Court of Israel was established in 1948, shortly after the declaration of the State of Israel. Rather than creating a legal order from scratch, Israel absorbed its procedural foundation and common-law principles from the British Mandate legal system, which governed the territory before independence. That inheritance still shapes the court today, above all in its role as a court of first instance for petitions against the government. Like the Supreme Court of India, which emerged from a similar British post-colonial transition around the same time, Israel’s court built its expansive power and heavy caseload on these foundations.
Does this court only hear appeals? Are there any cases in which it has original jurisdiction?
Appeals are only part of the story; the court operates in a dual capacity. First, it serves as the highest appellate tribunal for civil, criminal, and administrative matters, hearing appeals as of right from cases originating in Israel’s six district courts, and appeals by leave for cases that began in the 29 magistrates' courts.
Second, it sits as the high court of justice, exercising original jurisdiction, as a court of first and last instance, over petitions filed by individuals, NGOs, or politicians against government bodies, ministers, the military, and state authorities. This original jurisdiction is where the colonial inheritance matters most. The British concentrated judicial review in the highest court, staffed primarily by British judges, to prevent local Jewish and Arab judges in lower courts from ruling on government actions. Israel absorbed this arrangement, and it later became the foundation of the court's constitutional role.
Two defining features flow directly from this structure. The first is an extraordinary, non-discretionary caseload. Because the court cannot refuse mandatory appeals or high court petitions, it received over 11,000 new filings in 2024 alone, including 2,892 high court of justice petitions. The second feature is remarkable immediacy. Petitions alleging government overreach or constitutional violations reach the highest court directly without prior lower-court proceedings and are resolved in roughly two and a half months on average. This immediacy forms a cornerstone of the court’s political power, allowing it to adjudicate major public and political debates in real time.
Can the Supreme Court of Israel overturn acts of the Knesset [Israel’s parliament]? If so, how often does this occur?
Yes, but the road to that power was unusual. Israel has no single written constitution. Instead, the Knesset enacts Basic Laws, intended as chapters of a future constitution, which are usually amendable by a simple majority. In the landmark 1995 ruling Mizrahi Bank v. Migdal, the court held that Basic Laws function as Israel's constitutional framework, establishing that the judiciary may strike down ordinary legislation violating the rights they protect. This was Israel's Marbury v. Madison moment.
But the court has used this power sparingly. Since 1995, it has invalidated statutes or statutory provisions in only 25 cases, most of them between 2010 and 2020. By the standards of other supreme courts, such as those of the United States, Canada, and India, the Israeli court strikes down legislation relatively rarely. Most of the invalidated laws concerned issues like prisoners' rights, immigration, and taxation – matters largely at the margins of Israel's political debate. The main exception has been the politically charged issue of military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men.
In January 2024, the court took a dramatic step further. Sitting en banc (all 15 justices) for the first time in its history, it ruled in Movement for Quality Government v. Knesset that it also possesses authority to review Basic Laws themselves and strike down an amendment that negates Israel’s core identity as a Jewish and democratic state. While a large majority (12 of 15 justices) affirmed that authority, a narrow 8–7 majority then struck down, for the first time, an actual amendment to a Basic Law: the "reasonableness amendment," which had barred courts from reviewing government decisions on reasonableness grounds, and stood as the centerpiece of the government's 2023 judicial overhaul. More on that story later.
How many judges are on this court?
Fifteen, at full strength. But the court almost never sits en banc. To manage its overwhelming docket, more than 99% of panel cases are heard by three justices. Panels are expanded for mandatory procedures such as election appeals, or at the discretion of the president of the court (Israel's equivalent of a chief justice). Existing law grants the president broad authority over both panel size and composition. In recent years, critics have argued that this assignment power allows the president to shape outcomes in sensitive political cases. This concern featured in the judicial overhaul debate, discussed below.
The court’s operational size has become a political flashpoint in its own right. Only 11 justices currently serve on the bench. This is because four justices have reached the mandatory retirement age in recent years and have not been replaced. Since the governing coalition does not command a majority on the judicial selection committee, it cannot unilaterally appoint its preferred conservative or restraint-oriented candidates. In response, the justice minister, who chairs the committee, at first refused to convene it, and later kept Supreme Court of Israel appointments off its agenda, saying publicly that he would let the court “gradually disappear.” The standoff ultimately reached the court itself. Following petitions, the justices ordered the minister to convene the committee, which has since selected judges for lower courts, although litigation over the remaining Supreme Court of Israel vacancies continues.
You partially addressed this in your prior answer, but how are these judges selected?
Judges are chosen by a nine-member judicial selection committee: the justice minister and another cabinet minister, two Knesset members (by custom, one from the opposition), three Israeli Supreme Court justices, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association. No single branch controls the committee, and professionals hold the majority, occupying five of the nine seats. Since 2008, appointing a justice has required a seven-vote supermajority, meaning neither the politicians nor the judges can appoint a justice over the other side's objection. In practice, this mutual veto has forced compromise, producing benches that mix liberal and conservative justices.
That system is now in flux. In March 2025, in what remained of the judicial overhaul, the Knesset amended Basic Law. The two bar representatives will be replaced by two lawyers chosen by the politicians, one by the coalition and one by the opposition, flipping the committee’s professional majority into a political one. The justices lose their effective veto; each political bloc gains one. The amendment takes effect only after the next election, but whether it takes effect at all is an open question. Petitions against it are pending before all 11 sitting justices, who heard arguments this summer. The body deciding the amendment's fate is the very court that, in 2024, first claimed the power to strike down amendments to Basic Laws.
Do the judges serve terms – if so, of what length?
Justices serve no fixed term. Once appointed, they hold tenure until mandatory retirement at age 70. There are no lifetime appointments as in the U.S., making judicial departures predictable.
Historically, most justices joined the court in their mid-50s or 60s and served for about a decade (exceptions existed, most famously Aharon Barak, appointed at 42). But as political battles over the court intensified, the appointment age itself became strategic. Some justices were appointed in their mid-to-late 40s, extending their institutional influence for two decades or more, while others were chosen close to retirement to limit their tenure. The same 2025 amendment that restructures the judicial selection committee directly addresses this trend. If it takes effect, nominees under 55 could join the Supreme Court of Israel only with the unanimous consent of the committee.
Are cases decided by a simple majority?
Yes.
How is the opinion writer assigned?
There is no formal assignment rule. The justices on a panel settle among themselves who will write the lead opinion. That initial draft then circulates, and the other justices may join it, suggest revisions, or write a concurrence or dissent.
But in a court that sits in panels, the prior question is who sits on the case. Formally, as noted, that power belongs to the president of the court. In practice, for the vast majority of cases, panel composition has been managed since the early 2000s by the court’s secretariat using a largely randomized system tied to the calendar and areas of specialization. The president's hand is felt primarily in the exceptional expanded benches, and even there, assignments rest mainly on seniority.
Is there a tradition of concurrences or dissents on the court?
Yes, but the far stronger tradition is consensus. For example, in the Israeli Supreme Court Database, which Lee Epstein and I built covering all panel decisions from 2010 to 2018, only about 1% of routine three-justice cases include a dissent.
We think that the institutional features of the court directly sustain this high consensus norm. A court deciding thousands of cases a year has little time for separate writing; a mandatory docket it cannot select is dominated by routine appeals rather than ideologically charged controversies; and on a three-justice panel, open disagreement carries a steep collegial cost.
The telling finding is what happens when those conditions change. Dissent climbs steadily as panel size grows. In the rare cases heard by nine or more justices, which are the court's most consequential decisions, about 55% include at least one dissent, a rate remarkably close to that of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Would you say the Supreme Court of Israel is considered a particularly powerful institution – say, compared to the Knesset or the prime minister?
Yes. In terms of formal authority, the Israeli Supreme Court is considered one of the most powerful apex courts. As noted, it has claimed the power to strike down not only ordinary Knesset legislation but, in extreme cases, amendments to Basic Laws themselves. Its reach in administrative law is broader still. In a process that began in the early 1980s, the court dismantled its own traditional threshold barriers, all but abolishing strict standing and justiciability doctrines, significantly expanding access to the court, and devising creative remedies. At the same time, its reasoning shifted from legal formalism to a value-laden jurisprudence built on doctrines such as “reasonableness” and “proportionality.” The practical result was that major public debates over national values and priorities, while still fought in the Knesset and government, increasingly found their final review in the courtroom.
Three crucial points put this power in context: First, the court’s prominence is largely a function of institutional structure. Israel has no second legislative chamber, no presidential veto, no federal division of powers, and no binding supranational court. Under Israel's parliamentary system, a governing coalition that commands a Knesset majority effectively controls both the executive and legislative branches. Consequently, the Supreme Court of Israel stands as one of the few institutional checks on executive and legislative power.
Second, the court’s formal authority differs dramatically from everyday practice. Recall that the court has invalidated only 25 statutory provisions over three decades, mostly on matters peripheral to mainstream political debate. Empirical studies of petitions against the government reveal a similar pattern: the court reverses government policy or action in fewer than 10% of cases, dismisses the vast majority of petitions, and often exerts influence by nudging the state and petitioners toward compromise rather than issuing formal rulings against the government.
Third, the very perception of expansive authority has become the court's greatest vulnerability. It has drawn repeated attempts to curb the court's powers, culminating in the 2023 judicial overhaul.
What have been some particularly controversial issues decided by the Supreme Court of Israel throughout its history?
Let me choose three long-running battlegrounds. The first is rights without a constitution. The court began its life with no bill of rights to enforce, so it built one case by case. The foundational ruling is 1953’s Kol Ha’am, in which the court blocked the government from shutting down a Communist newspaper, holding that speech may be restricted only in the face of near-certain harm. Only in 1992 did the Knesset enact two Basic Laws, on human dignity and liberty and on freedom of occupation, as the beginning of a constitutional bill of rights. In a series of rulings following the 1995 Mizrahi Bank decision, the court read these Basic Laws broadly, extending protection to rights not explicitly mentioned in them, some even deliberately omitted, such as equality and freedom of expression. Each step drew fire.
The second is war. Because the court hears petitions as a first instance, it has reviewed military conduct in real time, including petitions by Palestinians in the territories occupied since 1967 against the defense minister, the army, and military courts. As Aharon Barak, the court's longtime president, famously put it in 2006: when the cannons roar, the muses are not silent. Landmark examples range from the 1979 Elon Moreh ruling, which blocked the seizure of privately owned Palestinian land where the purpose was settlement rather than military necessity, to the 1999 Public Committee Against Torture decision, banning coercive interrogation methods used by the security services.
The court continues to hear such petitions during the current war, including challenges concerning humanitarian aid to Gaza and conditions of detention, though it has largely deferred to the military on operational matters. This record has drawn criticism from both directions: too interventionist for some, too deferential for others.
The third is the military draft. The exemption of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students has occupied the court for four decades, in a cycle that keeps repeating: the court demands a statutory arrangement for the exemption, and the Knesset either fails to pass one or passes one that the court strikes down as unequal. Its June 2024 ruling ordering the state to begin drafting yeshiva students, in the middle of a war fought heavily by reservists, is the latest round, and the issue now sits at the center of Israeli politics.
What were some major issues recently decided by this court?
Today the court itself is at the center of public debate, and its defenders see it as the main bulwark against democratic backsliding. Much of the government's effort to expand its power has ended up before it. Beyond the reasonableness case, the court struck down, by a single vote, the statutory provision allowing the national security minister, who leads a far-right party, to direct police investigation policy. In July 2026 it invalidated the election of a new state comptroller, formerly the prime minister's personal lawyer, who was chosen in violation of secret-ballot rules, and ordered a new vote. And its most consequential cases are still pending: the restructuring of the judicial selection committee and a new law curbing the attorney general's powers.
The United States Supreme Court is often seen as partisan. Does the Supreme Court of Israel have a partisan reputation?
I’d like to split the question in two: how the justices actually decide cases, and how the court is perceived by the public.
On decision-making, our empirical studies found relatively low levels of partisan voting in the Israeli Supreme Court, especially when compared with SCOTUS. The primary explanation lies in judicial selection. Across the comparative systems we studied, a clear pattern emerged: the greater the weight politicians hold in appointing judges, the more partisan those judges behave on the bench. In Israel’s long-standing judicial selection committee, politicians hold four of the nine seats, and explicit party labels have rarely attached to individual justices. The same institutional traits that foster consensus, including a mandatory docket filled with routine cases, heavy caseloads, and three-justice panels, further dampen partisan polarization.
This does not mean ideology is absent from the bench, but rather that it does not align with party lines. In a fluid, multiparty coalition system, unlike the American two-party structure, it is sometimes difficult to define what a "party-line vote" would look like. Instead, ideological voting surfaces in specific domains: in religion-and-state disputes, where religious justices are statistically more supportive of religious interests than their secular colleagues, and in major constitutional cases, where a left-right divide occasionally emerges.
Public perception, however, is a different story. As political attacks on the judiciary intensified over the past decade, the court has increasingly been portrayed as a bastion of an old liberal elite, tilting left of Israel's political center. That framing is precisely what fueled the drive to restructure the judicial selection committee. Under the new model, if it ultimately takes effect, a majority of the committee will be politically chosen. That shift could, over time, fundamentally alter judicial behavior on the bench, and with it, my answer to this question.
So you’ve already covered this a bit, but can you tell me more about the judicial reform bills? What events spurred these? How did the court respond to them? Where do things stand now?
On January 4, 2023, days after Israel’s most right-wing government was sworn in, Justice Minister Yariv Levin unveiled the government's plan to overhaul the legal system. The proposed legislative package rested on four pillars: granting the coalition control over judicial appointments; significantly restricting judicial review of legislation alongside an "override clause" to re-enact struck-down statutes; abolishing reasonableness review, a doctrine familiar across common-law systems that allows courts to set aside government decisions falling outside the range of choices a reasonable authority could make; and turning independent legal advisers into political appointees whose legal opinions would no longer bind the government. Unveiling the initiative, Levin explicitly emphasized that this was "only the first phase" of a much broader reform.
The initiative drew on decades of right-wing frustration with the growth of judicial power since the 1995 Mizrahi Bank decision, alongside ultra-Orthodox parties’ urgency to secure draft exemptions from judicial invalidation. Hovering over it all was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial. Opponents argued that the overhaul was designed, at least in part, to serve his legal and political interests; supporters, echoing Netanyahu himself, portrayed the trial as proof of a politicized justice system that needed reining in. Yet the overhaul had appeared in no campaign platform, and its scope and speed took the country by surprise.
What followed was the largest protest movement in Israel’s history. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated weekly. Polls showed that a majority of Israelis, including many moderate right-wing voters, opposed the overhaul package. Among the protesters were tech entrepreneurs and economists, reservists, and retired security chiefs. American readers may recognize the inversion of Hamilton's formula: the branch that commands neither the sword nor the purse found its defenders among the holders of both. The demonstrators saw the plan as a threat to Israeli democracy. Supporters countered that a parliamentary majority possessed a clear mandate, and that calls for civil disobedience and reservists’ refusal to volunteer were the truly undemocratic force.
The October 7 attack and the subsequent war first paused and then recalibrated the overhaul legislation. The internal rupture and the calamity remain painfully intertwined, though each camp assigns blame differently. Supporters of the current government argue that months of protests and reservist refusals signaled fatal weakness to Hamas. Opponents contend the government was so obsessively consumed by the overhaul that it ignored clear security warnings, pointing to Netanyahu firing Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after he warned that the overhaul and the rift it was opening inside the military directly endangered national security (a decision soon reversed under massive public pressure).
Of Levin’s original four pillars, the first to become law was the reasonableness amendment, enacted in July 2023, and the court struck it down in the ruling that established its authority to review Basic Laws. A related amendment from that year, shielding the prime minister from judicially declared incapacitation, was deferred by the court to the next Knesset as an abuse of the Knesset’s constituent power. Later came a much-softened version of the judicial selection committee reform, now awaiting the court’s judgment. And in its final days, the outgoing Knesset passed a law addressing the fourth pillar, curbing the attorney general’s authority; milder than the original plan, it, too, is already facing petitions before the court. I discussed the central amendments earlier.
But the deepest change is not legislative. Trust in the court has fallen sharply among supporters of the current government. The government refuses to recognize the chief justice elected in 2025 over its objection, new justices are not being appointed, and ministers have openly threatened to disobey rulings. With elections due within months, the court’s fate has become, for the first time in Israel’s history, a central campaign issue.
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