Aharon Barak

Aharon Barak was born in 1936 in Kaunas

Barak was born Erik Brick in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1936, the only son of Zvi Brick, a lawyer and Zionist activist, and Leah, a teacher. During the Holocaust the family was held in the Kovno Ghetto, and he was smuggled out and hidden by Lithuanian farmers. In 1947 the family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, settled in Jerusalem and took the name Barak.

He studied law, international relations and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned his law degree in 1958. After army service he completed a doctorate there in 1963 and studied at Harvard Law School in 1966 and 1967. He became a professor at the Hebrew University, founded the law journal Mishpatim and was dean of the law faculty from 1974.

From 1975 to 1978 he was Attorney General, and he decided to prosecute Leah Rabin in the Dollar Account affair. In 1978 he was legal adviser to the Israeli delegation at the Camp David talks. That year he joined the Supreme Court, and he sat on the Kahan Commission on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

He became Deputy President of the court in 1993 and President in 1995. He widened standing and justiciability and expanded the reasonableness standard, while critics said this harmed legal stability. After retiring in 2006 he taught at Reichman University, and in 2024 he served as Israel's ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice.