Summary
Israel’s Supreme Court, as Lahav presents its founding: inaugurated on 13 September 1948 in the former Palestine Supreme Court building in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound — a prosaic necessity after the justices’ preferred Tel Aviv building went to the Soviet Embassy, later hailed as symbolic of revived Jewish political life — with five justices, Simon Agranat joining as the sixth appointment in January 1949 (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1050-1095).
Details
- Its first conditions were dire: no library, paper scarce enough that opinions were written on the reverse of Mandatory forms, freezing chambers and failing electrics in the winter of 1949 (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1070-1095).
- The executive’s ambivalence followed it: justices were not regular invitees to state ceremonies, salary negotiations were adversarial and humiliating, diplomatic passports were refused despite agreed parity with cabinet ministers, and a judiciary-independence bill passed only in summer 1953 (the Judges Law, 20 August 1953) after the 1952 crisis over Minister of Justice Bernard Joseph’s attack on the judges (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1075-1110, 1250-1280).
- Without a constitution (the Knesset never enacted the one the Declaration promised), the Court in Zeev v. Gubernik declined judicial review on the Marbury model and held the Declaration of Independence to have political, not legal, authority; Kol ha-Am (1953) then made the Declaration a normative mediator for interpreting statutes and established substantive judicial review of executive discretion under a probable-danger test (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1130-1165, 1350-1384).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Simon Agranat, Moshe Smoira, Kol Ha’am Case, Israeli Declaration of Independence