Here's something I've been turning over. We know what lawyers are like. They tell war stories at dinner parties, they write memoirs, they show up in every third television drama. We know their personalities, their strategies, their career ladders. The people who actually decide things? They're a black box. We see them in robes, we read their rulings, and that's about it. Daniel sent us a prompt that gets right at this gap — he studied law himself, and he says he kept asking, who are these people? The answer he got was always some version of "senior lawyers who knew the right people," which he found deeply unsatisfying. He wants to know what actually drives someone to become a judge, what the transition from advocate to arbiter feels like, and what common threads run through judges across different legal systems.
It's a great question, and it lands at a moment when it's not academic at all. Last week, every living former president of Israel's Supreme Court — and there are several of them — issued a joint statement demanding the prime minister halt attacks on the judiciary. The current chief justice and the attorney general have separately warned that the government is endangering democracy. These are not people who do this lightly. Former Supreme Court presidents don't hold press conferences. So when they all speak at once, something extraordinary is happening.
The attacks they're responding to are not abstract policy disagreements. The government has been calling judges "ivory tower elites," "self-appointed," out of touch. The chief justice actually had to publicly scold a minister for refusing to meet with him. This is a raw, personal, institutional confrontation. Which forces the question Daniel's asking: who are these people under attack, and do they deserve it?
Because the attacks never engage with who judges actually are or how they got there. They just paint a caricature and swing at it. And that's what we want to dig into today — not the politics of the Israeli crisis, but the human reality underneath it. What does it take to become a judge? What motivates someone to pursue that path? And what does the job actually feel like from the inside?
Because here's the thing Daniel put his finger on. Almost nobody grows up saying "I want to be a judge." It's not like wanting to be a firefighter or a doctor. It's almost always a second career, often an accidental one. Which is strange when you think about it — this is one of the most powerful roles in any society, and the pipeline into it is oddly opaque.
The training is the same as a lawyer's training, but the job is fundamentally different. A lawyer advocates. A judge decides. Those are not the same cognitive muscles. Daniel mentioned reading those verbose, flowery judgments from higher courts and wondering — do they even write these themselves? And who are the people behind the prose? We're going to get into all of that.
We'll look at how judges are selected in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom — three very different systems. We'll talk about what the transition from lawyer to judge actually does to a person's mind. And we'll draw on what judges themselves have said about the experience, including some of the Israeli justices now in the crosshairs.
Let's start with the Israeli crisis, because it's happening right now and it throws the whole question into sharp relief.
Israel is an unusual case for understanding judges, because the entire system operates without a constitution. Most countries have a founding document that says "here's what the courts can do, here's what they can't." Israel doesn't. What it has is a set of Basic Laws passed over decades, and the Supreme Court gradually built its power of judicial review through precedent — essentially deciding, case by case, that it had the authority to strike down legislation.
Which means the boundaries are inherently fuzzier than in the US. In America, you can point to Article Three and say "this is where the judiciary's power comes from." In Israel, you're pointing to a chain of rulings that started in the nineties. That's a much thinner foundation when the political winds shift.
And that's what makes the current attacks so potent. When a government minister calls judges "self-appointed," he's exploiting a real ambiguity. Nobody elected them. Their authority is built on legal reasoning and institutional tradition, not a clear constitutional mandate. So the caricature lands — "ivory tower elites who answer to no one" — because there's just enough truth in the frame to make it stick.
Though "self-appointed" is a stretch. Israel has a nine-member Judicial Selection Committee — politicians, sitting judges, and bar association representatives. It's not like the justices picked themselves out of a phone book.
Right, and we'll get into how that committee actually works. But the point for now is that the attacks almost never engage with who these people are. They don't ask what qualifications it takes to reach the highest court, or what kind of person chooses to leave a lucrative legal career for a job where half the country will hate your decisions. The attacks are ad hominem because ad hominem works when the target is unknown.
That's the broader puzzle Daniel raised. Why are judges so unknown? Part of it is structural — judges don't give interviews the way politicians do. Their reasoning is supposed to speak for itself in the rulings. But that creates a vacuum, and the vacuum gets filled by whatever caricature is most politically useful.
What we want to do is fill that vacuum with something real. What does the selection pipeline actually look like? What happens to a lawyer's mind when they put on the robe? And what have judges themselves said about the experience — not the caricature, but the human being behind the bench?
Let's talk about how judges actually get the job, because that's where the "self-appointed" caricature either holds water or falls apart. And the systems vary wildly. Israel uses that nine-member Judicial Selection Committee I mentioned — three Supreme Court justices, two government ministers, two Knesset members, and two Bar Association representatives. You need a supermajority for Supreme Court appointments, which means the judges on the committee effectively have veto power.
It's designed to prevent any one faction from stacking the court. The politicians can't do it alone, and neither can the judges. It forces compromise.
In practice, it's been a political battleground for years. The current government has been trying to change the committee's composition to give politicians more control — that's actually one of the flashpoints in the current crisis. The former Supreme Court presidents who issued that joint statement last week specifically warned against "changes to the Judicial Selection Committee that would politicize judicial appointments.
Compare that to the United States, where there's no pretense of depoliticization. The president nominates, the Senate confirms. It's explicitly a political process. The confirmation hearings are televised spectacles — nominees get grilled on their judicial philosophy, their past rulings, sometimes their high school yearbooks.
That's the system Daniel was pointing to when he mentioned "politically connected" judges. In the US, you don't reach the Supreme Court without being known to the president's party. But here's the thing — "politically connected" doesn't mean unqualified. The people who reach that level have usually spent decades on lower federal courts or as prominent appellate litigators. The politics is in the selection, not necessarily in the competence.
Though the perception problem is real. When every confirmation is a partisan cage match, the public starts seeing judges as politicians in robes. That erodes trust even when the judges themselves are trying to be impartial.
The UK tried to solve this problem. In two thousand five, they created the Judicial Appointments Commission — an independent body that runs a merit-based selection process. Candidates apply, they're assessed on competencies, they do interviews and role-play exercises. The Lord Chancellor still has a theoretical veto, but it's rarely used. The whole thing is designed to be boring and bureaucratic, which is exactly the point.
The boringer the better, for judicial legitimacy. But here's what strikes me — none of these systems produces people who planned this career from age twelve. You don't go to law school saying "I'm going to be a Supreme Court justice." It's almost always a second act.
That's where Daniel's observation about the lawyer-to-judge transition gets really interesting. Because the skills that make you a great advocate — partiality, persuasion, framing everything in your client's favor — are exactly the skills you have to suppress as a judge. You're rewiring your entire cognitive approach.
I've heard former judges describe the first year on the bench as genuinely disorienting. You go from having a team, clients, a clear side to fight for, to sitting alone in a room with two stacks of briefs and no one to ask "what do you think?" The isolation hits fast.
There's a famous quote from an American federal judge, I think it was Learned Hand, who said something like: the first thing you discover as a judge is how much you don't know, and the second is how few people you can admit that to. The robe doesn't come with a manual.
Then there's the actual work. Daniel mentioned those verbose, ornate judgments and wondered if judges even write them. The answer is yes and no. In most high courts, the judge is ultimately responsible for the opinion — the reasoning, the structure, the voice. But clerks do substantial drafting. The judge outlines the argument, the clerks produce a draft, and then there's back-and-forth revision.
What's interesting is that the "flowery" language Daniel noticed is often deliberate. When a judge uses elaborate prose — metaphors, historical references, rhetorical flourishes — they're not just showing off. They're signaling that the decision was carefully reasoned, that it deserves authority. A terse, clinical ruling can read as dismissive. The style is part of the legitimacy.
When you read an Israeli Supreme Court opinion that spends three paragraphs on a Talmudic parable before reaching the holding, that's not self-indulgence. That's the judge saying "I have considered this deeply, from multiple angles, and here is why I'm ruling this way.
This connects back to the Israeli crisis in a specific way. The current chief justice — the one who publicly scolded a minister for refusing to meet — is not some detached academic writing in an ivory tower. These fifteen justices, serving until age seventy, are in the middle of a political firestorm. They're reading editorials calling them enemies of democracy, they're seeing their former colleagues issue unprecedented public warnings, and they're still expected to sit down and write dispassionate legal opinions.
That's the part the caricature completely misses. The "ivory tower elite" frame suggests these are people who've never been challenged, who float above the fray. The reality is they're in the fray every single day, and the only shield they have is the quality of their reasoning. When that stops being enough, the whole thing crumbles.
When the reasoning stops being enough, you get what we're seeing right now. Last week, every living former president of Israel's Supreme Court — these are people who spent decades cultivating judicial restraint in their public personas — issued a joint statement demanding the prime minister halt attacks on the judiciary. They didn't issue a polite suggestion. They didn't file a legal brief. They went public, together, in a way that is unprecedented.
That's the thing that should make people sit up. Former Supreme Court presidents don't do joint statements. That's not a thing that happens. It's like if all living former chief justices of the US Supreme Court held a press conference to say the president is endangering constitutional order. The fact that it happened tells you the normal channels have collapsed.
The chief justice separately warned that the government is endangering democracy — not "potentially concerning," not "raises questions.Meanwhile the attorney general, who is the government's own legal advisor, issued a similar warning. This is not the judiciary picking a fight. This is the judiciary saying the fight has already been brought to them and the institutional damage is real.
Which brings us back to Daniel's question about who these people actually are. Because if you only know the caricature — "self-appointed ivory tower elites" — then a bunch of former judges making a public statement sounds like a club of insiders protecting their own. But if you understand what it took for each of them to reach that court, what the job actually demands, and what they gave up to do it, the statement reads differently.
Let's talk about what the job demands, because this is where the loneliness piece comes in. I've read memoirs from judges across several systems — American, British, Israeli — and there's a recurring theme that almost reads like a clinical description of isolation. You lose your professional community the moment you take the bench. Former colleagues can't call you for lunch without it looking like ex parte contact. You can't vent about a difficult case to your spouse because you're not supposed to discuss pending matters. You sit in a room, you read thousands of pages, and then you decide.
Lawyers have built-in support systems. Partners, associates, clients who thank them or yell at them — at least it's feedback. Judges get almost none. You rule, you write the opinion, and then you move to the next case. Nobody sends a performance review. The only real feedback is whether a higher court reverses you, and even that is just legal reasoning on a page, not someone saying "here's how you're doing.
There's a passage from an Israeli Supreme Court justice — I believe it was Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, who retired a few years ago — where he described the first months on the bench as feeling like he'd been "dropped into a foreign country where he spoke the language but didn't understand the customs." Everything looked familiar — the courtroom, the briefs, the legal arguments — but the perspective shift was vertigo-inducing. He wasn't there to win anymore. He was there to resolve. And resolving is fundamentally lonelier than winning.
That vertigo is what the caricature completely erases. The "ivory tower" frame imagines judges as people who've never been in the trenches. But almost all of them spent decades in the trenches — as litigators, as prosecutors, as defense attorneys. They know exactly how the game is played. They just agreed to stop playing it and start refereeing. And the first thing you discover as a referee is that both teams hate you.
In the Israeli system right now, one of those teams is the government itself. The chief justice publicly scolded a minister for refusing to even meet with him — the justice minister, whose entire portfolio includes the court system, wouldn't sit down with the head of that system. That's not a policy disagreement. That's a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other branch's existence.
Which is what makes this a stress test, not just for Israel, but for the broader question of judicial independence. When the political branches decide that judges are just another political actor — just another faction to be defeated — the entire foundation of judicial review collapses. Because judicial review only works if people accept that judges are doing something fundamentally different from politics. Once that distinction blurs beyond recognition, you don't have a court system anymore. You have a battlefield with robes.
Here's the thing about Israel specifically. In a system without a constitution, that distinction was always thinner. The court built its authority through reasoning and precedent, not through a founding document that everyone agreed to. So when the government calls judges "self-appointed," they're exploiting a genuine structural vulnerability. The court's legitimacy rests on public trust more than on constitutional text. Erode the trust, and you erode the institution.
That's what the former presidents were warning about. They weren't issuing a joint statement to defend a particular ruling or a particular judge. They were defending the idea that judges are not just politicians in robes — that the selection process, however imperfect, produces people who are trying to do something different from what politicians do. And once that idea is gone, it's very hard to get back.
If you're listening to all this and thinking, okay, but how do I actually evaluate the next attack on the judiciary I hear — whether it's in Israel or the US or wherever — what do I do with this? I think there are two things to look for.
The first is the selection system. When someone calls judges "self-appointed" or "elites," ask: how do judges actually get on that court? In the US, they're nominated by a president and confirmed by the Senate — that's political by design. In the UK, they go through an independent merit commission — that's designed to be apolitical. In Israel, it's a hybrid committee that forces compromise between judges and politicians. The structure tells you what kind of actor the system is trying to produce. If the selection process is designed to filter for independence, then "self-appointed" is a caricature. If it's designed to filter for political alignment, then maybe the criticism has substance. Either way, you can't evaluate the attack without knowing the pipeline.
That's the filter. Before you even engage with the substance of a judicial independence debate, know how the judges got there. It immediately separates legitimate structural critique from ad hominem noise.
The second thing is language. Daniel mentioned those flowery, verbose judgments and wondered about them. The style is actually a signal. When a judge writes in elaborate, careful prose — with analogies, with historical context, with what reads like an attempt to persuade rather than just declare — they're showing you that they see their role as something more than a referee with a whistle. They're trying to earn the authority of their ruling, not just assert it. Terse, clinical language often signals a judge who sees their role as straightforward application of clear rules. Neither style is inherently better, but the style tells you how the judge understands their own power.
That's something anyone can do. Next time a big ruling drops in your country, read a few paragraphs of the actual opinion. Not the news summary — the opinion itself. You'll see the voice immediately. Is this judge trying to persuade you, or are they just announcing a result? That tells you volumes about how they see the institution they're serving.
The practical takeaway here is embarrassingly simple. Look up the selection process for your country's highest court. It takes ten minutes. Who picks the judges? What qualifications are required? Is there a retirement age? That knowledge is the foundation for evaluating any claim about judicial bias or independence. Without it, you're just reacting to vibes.
Vibes are what the caricatures run on. The "ivory tower elite" attack works because most people have never looked up how a Supreme Court justice actually gets there. Once you know, you can tell whether the attack is describing a real problem or just swinging at a ghost.
The question that hangs over all of this is whether the Israeli judiciary actually survives the current assault. And I don't mean survives in the sense of continuing to exist as a building with people in robes. I mean survives as an institution that commands enough public trust to do its job. Because once a government successfully paints the court as just another political faction, the rulings don't land the same way. Compliance becomes optional. That's the cliff we're watching.
It's not just an Israeli question. Look at what's happened in Hungary, in Poland, in places where the executive branch decided the judiciary was an obstacle and moved to dismantle it. The playbook is consistent. First you delegitimize the judges personally. Then you change the selection process to favor loyalists. Then you pack the court. And at each step, the defenders of the judiciary find themselves arguing about institutional design while the attackers are telling a story about out-of-touch elites. The story almost always wins in the short term.
Because stories are easier to tell than civics lessons. "Ivory tower elites stealing your democracy" is a sentence. Explaining why a nine-member selection committee with a supermajority requirement protects against majoritarian overreach is a paragraph. The paragraph loses every time unless people already understand who judges are and why the system is built that way.
That's what makes Daniel's question so much more than academic curiosity. If we don't understand the people in robes — where they came from, what the job demands, what they gave up to do it — then we can't defend the institution. We're left with vibes. And vibes don't protect judicial independence.
The former presidents who issued that joint statement last week know this. They spent careers avoiding public controversy, writing careful opinions, maintaining the distance that judicial legitimacy requires. And then they looked at the current moment and decided silence was more dangerous than speaking. That's the calculation every democracy facing this pressure eventually has to make.
Now — Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early medieval period, Mongolian beekeepers produced a rare single-source honey from the flowers of the Caragana shrub, known locally as altan khargana. A single clay-sealed jar of this honey was discovered in a seventh-century burial mound in the Orkhon Valley in two thousand nineteen, still viscous and chemically identifiable to its botanical source — making it the oldest surviving artefact of Mongolian apiculture.
I have questions about seventh-century Mongolian beekeeping that I suspect will never be answered.
The Orkhon Valley burial mound honey jar is not where I expected this episode to end. This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for the fact and for everything else. If you enjoyed this, do us a favor and leave a review wherever you listen — it helps. We'll be back soon.
