Israel: Creating a Constitution — The Use of Foreign Precedents by the Supreme Court (1994-2010)

Abstract

This chapter is the Israeli contribution to a comparative project on the citation of foreign precedents in constitutional adjudication. This project brings together constitutional law scholars from different states and different legal systems to deal with the use of foreign law by constitutional judges in a comparative perspective. The Israeli chapter demonstrates that foreign law has always been extensively used in Israel because of, among other reasons, the great local impact of English law. That trend visibly changed in the early 1980s when American law became a stronger reference source,. The use of foreign adjudication is rich and vast , as the empirical reserach reveals, though it has not always been coherent . The chapter discusses the minimal number of references to continental courts, which is surprising in view of the similarities of Israeli parliamentary system with some European countries, and addresses a number of questions as to the methods in which foreign precedents are chosen by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Keywords: Israe, constitutional law, foreign precedents, comparative law