Prof. Noah Feldman: The Judiciary Crisis in Israel

Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. The Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He is the author of nine books.

[jordankialy]

How do you justify the Supreme Court intervention in “Israel’s constitution” and the fact that the president of the Supreme Court is the first one that declared that Israel has a constitution 🤔🤔

[parakramdivya]

Hit like if you are here after oct 7.

[zevspitz]

It's all well and good to argue that an independent judiciary protects human rights, but who gets to determine what are those rights, what relative weights do they have, and in a conflict between the rights of two parties, which takes precedence?
How a judge will resolve these questions inevitably depends on the justice's background. For example, in a question on the right to public assembly for prayer, a secular liberal judge may deprioritize this right, where a religious justice would give it higher priority.
The coalition's goal is not to create a yes-voice for the coalition, but rather to balance the voices on the court across a wide range of value axes -- e.g. religious vs secular, Jewish vs Arab, conservative vs activist, Ashkenazi vs Mizrahi, traditional vs liberal progressive. From that perspective, a purely right-wing court would be just as bad as the current purely left-wing court.
This is obviously the coalition's intention, because the current proposal (as modified during the Knesset committee discussions) only allows the current coalition to single-handedly push through two appointments to the court per Knesset. Further appointments will require support from the opposition and the judiciary. The end result is that each justice minister can leave his or her personal stamp on the court in the form of one or two appointments; over a long period of time resulting in a broad range of voices.
57:46 The Haredi community has been talking about this for a quarter-century. But of course they don't matter, right?
1:11:22 Very discretionary and very subjective. For example, half the legal opinions for Deri's latest disqualification based themselves on the unreasonableness doctrine. (The other half based themselves on the Deri's supposed commitment not to return to politics, which the former AG declared to be a myth.)

[honeybeechanger]

Okay mizrachi literally means East or Eastern. And yes it does mean that they have an Arabic origin or the national identity of the country where they came from was Muslim and they spoke Arabic. That is to make a distinction between people who are Sephardic and speak with Dino and come from Spanish Jewish traditions not Arabic.

Mizrach is the sign in synagogue it tells you which way to pray towards Jerusalem if you're in the West!

Did the term become more derogatory maybe like Oriental maybe but I think ignoring the actual definition is a mistake

[michaelvainer]

Adventurer PM Bibi---despite a conflict of interest----stubborny promotes the Judicial COUP !

[parakramdivya]

Absolutely clueless and wrong about India's case. The law under which Rahul Gandhi was disqualified was brought in by his party I.e if someone is convicted by a court with punishment for more than 2 years is automatically disqualified it was a state court judgement which was overturned by higher court and his membership was restored.
BJP HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
Shamelessly clueless.