Summary
Jacob S. Shapiro, as Lahav presents him: Russian-born lawyer, study partner of Simon Agranat for the Palestine bar examinations in 1933, later Israel’s first attorney general and minister of justice, whose reputation soared representing the Yishuv in illegal-immigration-by-sea trials and who enjoyed Ben-Gurion’s confidence (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 780-800, 1015-1045).
Details
- As Pinhas Rosen’s attorney general in 1948 Shapiro planned the minister’s Haifa visit and lobbied Rosen to include Agranat among the five Supreme Court appointees; he remembered Agranat threatening to resign if not made president of the district court — “For the first time, I saw that Shimon had an appreciation of himself” (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1020-1045).
- Shapiro was overtly partial to the English way of doing things, against Rosen’s preference for the continental legal model (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1015-1035).
- Of the Haifa lawyers, Shapiro was one of the few who understood the fine legal quality of Agranat’s elaborate magistrate opinions when the local bench and bar mocked them (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 945-965).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Simon Agranat, Pinhas Rosen