The Israeli Supreme Court Under Three Female Chief Justices

Yuval Erez

JSD Candidate, Yale Law School

A new book, edited by Professors Erin F. Delaney and Rosalind Dixon, focuses on the phenomenon of women as judicial leaders across the globe, exploring their contributions to advancing feminism as well as institutional reforms and jurisprudential outcomes. This blog post seeks to add to the examples discussed in the book by highlighting the unique case study of female Chief Justices on the Israeli Supreme Court since 2006, when Israel appointed its first female Chief Justice – a milestone that marks its twentieth anniversary this year. 

Israel’s first female Supreme Court Justice, Miriam Ben-Porat, was appointed in 1977, nearly thirty years after independence. Since then, only fourteen women have served as permanent justices. Yet, between 2006 and 2023, three women – Dorit Beinisch, Miriam Naor and Esther Hayut – led the Israeli judiciary for most of that period. This post will highlight some of their contributions to Israeli constitutionalism. 

This succession of female Chief Justices reflects Israel’s longstanding seniority convention, under which the longest-serving Supreme Court Justice is ordinarily appointed Chief Justice (under current law, the term of office is limited to a maximum of seven years). Although the Judicial Selection Committee formally votes on the appointment, its role has traditionally been largely procedural. Beinisch, Naor and Hayut were therefore the Court’s longest-serving justices when appointed. However, their tenures were far from easy. All three female chief justices served amidst growing tensions between the political system and the Supreme Court. They all had to contend with Ministers of Justice who were opposed to the Court, making institutional cooperation particularly challenging in a system where the two offices must work closely together.

Dorit Beinisch served as Chief Justice from 2006 to 2012. A pioneering figure in Israeli legal history, she had previously become the first woman to serve as State Attorney (1989–1995) and, in 1995, the fifth woman appointed permanently to the Supreme Court. After more than a decade on the Court, she succeeded Chief Justice Aharon Barak, whose transformative tenure established the Court’s authority to review legislation for compatibility with Israel’s Basic Law, regarded as the building blocks of a future constitution. Beinisch followed Barak’s legacy and remained committed to protecting the constitutional rights enshrined in the Basic Laws, including reviewing legislation. One of her most influential opinions struck down a law authorizing the establishment of privately operated prisons. Writing for an 8-1 majority, Beinisch held that delegating the state’s coercive authority over prisoners to a for-profit private operator disproportionately infringed upon the prisoners’ constitutional rights of human dignity and liberty.

Beinisch also contributed to the Court’s jurisprudence on feminism and women’s rights. In 2000, she established a precedent prohibiting corporal punishment of children, rejecting family privacy as a justification for such conduct. She also addressed sex discrimination in pay and employment benefits, and dissented against the lenient plea bargain reached with former President Moshe Katsav, who had been investigated for multiple sexual offences. In her final decision as Chief Justice, in a case in which some of the petitioners were single mothers, she struck down a provision denying income support benefits to individuals who owned or used a car, finding that it violated the constitutional right to a minimum standard of human dignity. 

Alongside her important judicial work, Chief Justice Beinisch demonstrated strong leadership protecting the institution against attacks from the Executive. She served alongside Ministers of Justice, such as Daniel Friedman, who initiated policies oppositional to the Court. These policies included attempts to limit the scope of judicial review, as well as challenges to the authority of the Chief Justice as the head of the judicial system in managerial issues. Eventually, many of these reforms did not pass.

Following the three-year tenure of Asher Grunis, Miriam Naor became Chief Justice in 2014, serving until her retirement in 2017. Unlike Beinisch, Naor had spent most of her career in the judiciary, beginning as a Magistrate Court judge at age 32 and gradually rising through the judicial ranks. Although widely regarded as a highly accomplished judge, she had limited experience in institutional leadership before becoming Chief Justice.

Unlike Beinisch, Naor was associated with a more restrained approach to judicial review. Nevertheless, she firmly defended the Court’s authority to intervene in cases involving serious human rights violations, including prolonged detention of asylum seekers. When the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) enacted new legislation following the invalidation of an earlier detention law, Naor maintained that the Court had both the authority and the duty to review the revised provisions. She also adopted a stringent approach to political corruption, notably holding that candidates for mayoral office could be disqualified while under indictment.

Naor was firm about the protection of women. For example, before her elevation to Chief Justice, she authored the Supreme Court’s unanimous judgment dismissing former President Moshe Katsav’s appeal against his criminal convictions. Writing for the Court, she affirmed his convictions for rape, indecent acts, an indecent act committed by force, sexual harassment, and obstruction of justice. The decision described Katsav’s conduct as degrading and reprehensible, holding that it justified a severe sentence and stressing that, because he had occupied one of the highest public offices in the state, the punishment had to carry a significant deterrent effect.

Naor, too, had to deal with severe political attacks on the court. At the time, the main issue was pressures put on the court regarding the selection of new judges and justices. The Minister of Justice at the time was Ayelet Shaked, with whom Naor had some notable clashes. At the same time, the two women maintained warm relations on a personal level in a manner that impacted the way the conflict with the political system was managed.

Esther Hayut succeeded Naor as Chief Justice in 2017 and served until 2023. Like her predecessor, she began her judicial career relatively young and had extensive experience on the bench before assuming the Court’s leadership. By the end of her tenure, women held six of the Court’s fifteen seats, the highest proportion in its history. Currently, four of the eleven sitting justices are women.

Hayut led the Court through one of its most turbulent periods, confronting the constitutional challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, controversies surrounding the indictment of a sitting Prime Minister, and the government’s judicial overhaul launched in January 2023. Her tenure culminated in a landmark decision in which a full fifteen-justice panel - over which she presided - invoked the unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine for the first time, invalidating an amendment to a Basic Law that formed part of the first wave of the government’s overhaul plan.

Regarding gender issues, Hayut led the decision addressing whether a woman was entitled to a one-half share in the marital home owned by her husband despite allegations concerning the wife’s marital infidelity. In 2021, she headed the panel which stated that an amendment to Israel’s Surrogacy Law, which excluded same-sex couples and single men from access to surrogacy, was unconstitutional. Beyond case law in the narrow sense, during her time as chief justice, the Israeli judiciary adopted its Procedure on the Testimony of Victims of Sexual Offences. This was designed to make criminal proceedings more responsive to the needs of victims of sexual violence by establishing uniform judicial practices for receiving their testimony. In addition, this procedure established that serious sexual offence cases heard in the District Courts generally should be assigned to mixed-gender judicial panels.

Over the past twenty years, female Chief Justices have led the Israeli Supreme Court for approximately fourteen years, during which the judiciary has remained resilient despite mounting political pressure. Their prominence contrasts sharply with the declining representation of women in Israeli political leadership, including the continued exclusion of women from the electoral lists of some parties. This contrast is particularly striking in a country that elected a female Prime Minister as early as 1969. In this sense, the significance of Beinisch’s, Naor’s, and Hayut’s judicial leadership extends beyond the legal sphere itself.

Yuval Erez is a J.S.D. Candidate, Yale Law School. I am grateful to CJ Glicksman, Rosario Grimà Algora, Meital Pinto, Avi Siegal, Ori Shprach and Lucie Vodvarkova for insightful conversations and valuable comments regarding this blog post. I would also like to thank Natalia Morales-Cerda for her wonderful editing of this blog post.

Suggested Citation: Yuval Erez, ‘The Israeli Supreme Court Under Three Female Chief Justices’ IACL-AIDC Blog (3 November 2026), https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2026-posts/2026/11/3/the-israeli-supreme-court-under-three-female-chief-justices