Aharon Barak (Hebrew: אהרן ברק; born 16 September 1936) is an Israeli lawyer and jurist who served as President of the Supreme Court of Israel from 1995 to 2006.

[2] At the end of the war, after wandering through Hungary, Austria, and Italy, Barak and his parents reached Rome, where they spent the next two years.

When the Attorney General began dealing with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Barak, being a Holocaust survivor, preferred not to be involved in the work.

Barak is married to Elisheva Barak-Ussoskin, former vice president of the National Labor Court, with whom he has three daughters and a son, all trained in the law.

After his retirement from the Supreme Court, Barak joined the staff of the Reichman University in Herzliya, and he teaches in the master's degree program for Commercial Law.

In his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter praises Barak as a negotiator despite the political disagreements between them.

[5] He canceled the standing test which Israel's Supreme Court had used frequently, and greatly expanded the scope of justiciability by allowing petitions on a range of matters.

Professor Daphna Barak-Erez commented that:"One of the most significant impacts of Judge Barak on Israeli law is found in the change which he led with regard to all matters of justiciability.

Judge Barak was the instigator and leader of the outlook which regards the traditional doctrine of justiciability as inappropriately and unnecessarily limiting the matters which the court deals with.

Barak's critics have argued that, in doing so, the Supreme Court under his leadership harmed judicial consistency and stability, particularly in the private sector.

[7] After 1992, much of his judicial work was focused on advancing and shaping Israel's Constitutional Revolution (a phrase which he coined), which he believed was brought about by the adoption of Basic Laws in the Israeli Knesset dealing with human rights.

The Israeli legal commentator Ze'ev Segal wrote in a 2004 article, "Barak sees the Supreme Court as a [force for societal change], far beyond the primary role as a decisor in disputes.

Three months later he published his final judgments, among them a number of precedents regarding damages in tort for residents of the Palestinian territories, Israel's policy of targeted killing, and preferential treatment for IDF veterans.

[10] On June 5, 2024, Barak resigned from his role as an ad hoc judge, citing personal reasons.

On the issue of the substantial expansion of the right of standing and the test of reasonableness of an administrative decision (which grants the courts the power to overrule an administrative decision if the judge is convinced that it does not "stand [within the] bounds of reasonableness"), Amnon Rubinstein wrote:" Thus a situation has arisen whereby the Supreme Court may convene and decide on every conceivable issue.

[citation needed] Among critics of Barak's judicial activism are former President of the Supreme Court of Israel Moshe Landau, Ruth Gavison, and Richard Posner.

Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and authority on jurisprudence, criticised Barak's decision to interpret the Basic Laws as Israel's constitution, stating that "only in Israel ... do judges confer the power of abstract review on themselves, without benefit of a constitutional or legislative provision.