Learning from Judicial Activism in the Holy Land
A new book reveals lessons for America from Israel's missteps.
I hope everyone is having a terrific holiday season. Today is Boxing Day in the British Commonwealth, which traditionally meant giving “Christmas boxes” to the less fortunate but has evolved to become, in the absence of Black Friday, a day of shopping, sports, and family gatherings. That also makes it a perfect time to give that special—or somewhat special, or well-acquainted—someone Shapiro’s Gavel. With a lot of people having a slow or “dead” week next week when you eat too much cheese and lose track of what day of the week it is, you can catch up on three-and-a-half years of posts and make a New Year’s resolution to keep up with my purple prose when it hits your in-box. Good tidings to all and see you next year! —IS
Yonatan “Johnny” Green’s Rogue Justice is the book Americans needed when they watched, bemused, as Israelis took to the streets in 2023 over something called “judicial reform.” It’s an exegesis of what happens when a high court is allowed to become a super‑legislature—and why Americans who think “the courts will save democracy” should be careful what they wish for.
Green writes with the zeal of a convert. As he recounts, his own “red pill” moment came when he read Daniel Friedmann’s assessment of the Israeli Supreme Court and realized that Israel’s legal elite had taught him a carefully curated version of reality. That shock ultimately led him to co-found (with Aylana Meisel) the Israel Law & Liberty Forum—essentially Israel’s Federalist Society. That gave him a front‑row seat to the country’s legal wars, as well as access to a deep bench of sources across the ideological spectrum.
Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel, by Yonatan Green (Academica Press, 698 pp., $40)
The book is organized in three parts. “Foundation” details the structural oddities that made Israeli judicial supremacy possible, especially the way judges are chosen and the court’s centralized control over the entire judiciary. “Ascendancy” traces how, beginning in the 1980s, the court discarded traditional doctrines of interpretation, standing, and justiciability, and armed itself with tools like the “reasonableness” doctrine and what Green calls the “Deri doctrine” of judicial impeachment. “Supremacy” then shows how the court crowned itself constitutional overlord—without a written constitution—through its invention of a “pseudo‑constitution” and aggressive judicial review of Knesset (parliamentary) legislation.
For American readers, the most striking chapter may be the one on judicial appointments.
