Episode Details

Why are judges such a mystery? In this episode, we explore the human reality behind the bench — what drives a lawyer to become a judge, how the transition from advocate to arbiter rewires the mind, and what common threads run across different legal systems. We look at three very different selection processes: Israel's supermajority committee, the U.S.'s partisan cage match, and the U.K.'s deliberately boring merit system. And we ground it all in the current crisis in Israel, where every living former Supreme Court president just issued an unprecedented joint statement defending the judiciary. This is not about the politics of the moment — it's about who these people actually are, and why the caricatures never match the reality.