Will the New Nation-State Law Tempt Israel’s Supreme Court to Overstep its Powers Again?

In 1787, an American founding father writing under the pseudonym “Brutus” issued a warning about one of the key provisions in the constitution then being debated in Philadelphia:

The supreme court under this constitution would be exalted above all other power in the government, and subject to no control. . . . I question whether the world ever saw, in any period of it, a court of justice invested with such immense powers and yet placed in a situation so little responsible. . . . There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature. . . . Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.

Whether or not the U.S. Supreme Court has realized Brutus’s dark forecast (preserved for posterity in the Anti-Federalist Papers) is up for debate. But it’s safe to say that Israel’s Supreme Court has far surpassed his gloomiest predictions, having, in the words of the American legal scholar Richard Posner, “created out of whole cloth . . . a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices.”