In rare remarks directed at fellow Supreme Court justices Yitzchak Amit and other left-wing justices, justice Alex Stein slammed the Court’s increasing political intervention, saying that a judge who invents laws is no more than a “politician in a robe.”

Speaking on Tuesday evening at a conference of the Israel Law and Liberty Forum at Reichman University, Stein attacked the notion that the court should balance the power of the government.

“The court system must protect powers and sustainable rights but not invent laws,” Stein said. “It is absolutely forbidden for the court to descend into the political arena. The moment it does, the judge loses his function as a judge and becomes nothing more than a politician disguised in a robe, and that is not something I want to do. If someone had told me that this is what I’m supposed to do, I wouldn’t have taken the job—I was doing fine in academia.”

Stein also said that he opposes the rhetoric of “basic values of the system,” which, he says, places the judge above the law. “There is the expression ‘the baisc values of the system,’ as my colleagues on the other side of the debate say,” he asserted. “The moment someone says that—in my view, it’s as if they’re saying, ‘I am the law.’ I don’t work that way—I’m not the law. In my view, the very function called ‘judging’ is violated the moment you don’t follow this path.”

“I know there are those who will call me an extreme formalist (a judge whose judicial decisions are based purely on law without regard to personal or political values),” he said. “That’s okay. I have no problem with labels—you can disagree. But the moment you disagree, you’re essentially disagreeing with the idea that law is an objective reality. And if you disagree with that, then we’re not playing the same game, and not according to the same rules.”

“I say with full caution: if you look at all of the Knesset’s work over the years, you’ll see that it’s not true that there were interventions in laws—most laws were approved. The public doesn’t see the petitions we dismiss without a hearing. My position is that this is the law, and this is what we will accept. Do I always agree with the law on a value level? Absolutely not. I may even think that the legislator made a mistake—but it’s still the law.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)