The Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel (Academica Press, 2025)

Israel’s Supreme Court is the most powerful in the democratic world. But how did a handful of unelected judges come to hold such sway over a nation’s laws, politics, and future? In Rogue Justice, Israeli-American attorney Yonatan Green recounts the Court’s extraordinary rise — and the bitter controversy it has unleashed.

Through close analysis of landmark rulings, novel doctrines, and the structural features of Israel’s legal system, Green traces the Court’s ascent from a modest judicial institution to the central arbiter of Israel’s political and social disputes. Revealing how judicial supremacy came to dominate Israeli governance, the book situates Israel’s constitutional crisis within broader global debates of pressing concern for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers alike. As Israel faces a new constitutional showdown, Rogue Justice is an urgent and accessible guide to the struggle over law, democracy, and power in the Jewish State.

Below is an excerpt from the book:

All Founders, No Framers

To understand Israel’s system of government is first to acknowledge the haphazard, sporadic, fitful and arbitrary manner in which it came into being. Our governing institutions and mechanisms were not the result of some methodical deliberative effort involving the wisest and most learned individuals of the era, nor did they organically evolve through centuries of practical experience. Rather, the modern State of Israel was very much “jump-started” with a hodgepodge of disparate governmental and legal arrangements. Some were inherited from the region’s previous rulers such as the British and Ottoman empires; some were adapted from recently-created skeletal institutions of local and international Jewish self-governance; some were born of immediate necessity and were virtually invented on the spot.

Israel was formally founded in 1948, in the midst of a major war for survival which was about to get far worse. Its governing apparatus was roughly adapted from the existing colonial mechanisms set up by the British Mandate, in combination with additional existing semi-autonomous institutions of Jewish self-rule (known broadly as the Yishuv) under the British. The new Israeli electoral system mirrored the existing method for representation of Jewish factions in the Yishuv institutions. Its legal architecture and culture included significant elements of the Common Law introduced by the British, which were themselves adapted by the British for colonial rule (such as leaving out jury trials); yet also incorporated swaths of Ottoman law, including the existing judicial hierarchy, a complex web of religious courts and an Islam-based Civil Code of private law; and all while most leading Israeli attorneys, judges and jurists had actually been educated and trained in Central and Western Europe.

While Israel’s governmental starting point was indeed messy, the founding generation could theoretically have revamped and reshaped the new State’s governing order. The Israeli Declaration of Independence stated the intent to draft and ratify a constitution within a short timeframe, but this never came about (this will be discussed in detail in Part III). However, noting that Israel did not adopt a written constitution upon its establishment fails to capture the essential point. More than merely skipping the “technical” act of adopting a legal constitution, the Israeli founding generation simply never engaged in the type of discussion that could have served as its basis – that is, a conscious national conversation about fundamental governmental powers and the institutions wielding them, about checks and balances, about the process and limitations of democratic self-rule, about core shared values and so on. This is especially true with regard to the definition and design of Israel’s judicial branch. Those seeking the theoretical origins of Israeli governing mechanisms and the processes by which they were established will return virtually empty-handed; those seeking the writings and deliberations of Israel’s political thinkers and learned statesmen to which our institutions and system of government can be traced will be disappointed. Israel had no “Federalist Papers,” no Philadelphia Convention, no Hamilton or Madison.

To be sure, Israel was blessed with a formidable array of extraordinary leaders at its founding – towering men and women of deep intellect and enormous capability. But (with some limited exceptions) few had a discernible passion or the requisite experience for “constitutional design,” the specialized field of assembling the many moving pieces of an effective and optimal system of government; perhaps more importantly, none had the opportunity to actively pursue such an endeavor. Before the founders of 1948 lay the gargantuan and eminently practical task of state-building under impossible conditions while trying to win an existential war of survival. The critical need to stave off imminent extinction by military foes, while maintaining the societal and economic viability of the precariously fragile new State of Israel, took precedence over what seemed to be lofty goals of a constitutional re-design.

Thus, Israel settled for whatever systems we had in place at the time, and has been plodding along with them, for the most part, to this day. Many if not most of the core governmental arrangements and institutions in Israel were never the product of wise deliberation and acute insight, nor of long-standing practice and hard-earned experience, but rather were born of accident, coincidence and happenstance. Israel had many founders, but no framers.

Yonatan Green, an Israeli-American attorney, is the author of Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel. He serves as an Assistant Professor, and as Director of the Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, at the School of Civic Leadership, University of Texas, Austin. Born and raised in Israel, Green was previously a Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for the Constitution and had co-founded the Israel Law & Liberty Forum.