He shares that high estimation of his talents, and appears to entertain few self-doubts about his ability to determine the truth, or his right to impose it on others. Former court president Moshe Landau pointed to this hubris in his eye-opening interview with journalist Avi Shavit last October. Justice Barak's legal views are not that of a disinterested academic, but those of the most powerful figure the Israeli legal system has ever known. When Barak describes law primarily in terms of particular rights, which judges are best suited to determine, even when they have to extract them from the ether, the judge of whom he is speaking is himself. Similarly, Barak's summary dismissal of all proposals for reform of the current system of judicial selection reflects his position as the most influential figure at present in the selection of every judge in Israel.
All opinions are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Barak, however, views the opinions of democratically elected legislators as less equal than those of justices, who are selected out of the sight of the public by a small panel controlled by the court president. Among those fundamental rights is to have the Supreme Court superior to the other branches. Yet each one of these proposals seeks nothing more than to correct anomalies in the Israeli legal system and to bring that system more into line with virtually every other parliamentary democracy. Barak's lack of concern for democracy as a process of how laws are enacted and by which branch of government, finds its parallel in his views on Israel's constitutional development. He felt no compunction about elevating the 1992 Basic Laws to constitutional status and claiming that they granted the Supreme Court vast new powers.