Edmund E. Levy (Hebrew: אדמונד אליהו לוי, born October 11, 1941) was a judge of the Supreme Court of Israel and member of the Judicial Selection Committee (Israel).
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Levy was born in Iraq to supporters of the Herut movement. He emigrated to Israel with is parents at the age of 10, where he grew up in Ramat Gan.
After his military service which ended in 1961, he began working at the Ramla Magistrate's Court and at the same time studied statutory law at the Tel Aviv University. In 1970 he got his lawyer license and opened his own office in the city. he also served for a brief time as vice mayor of Ramla on behalf of the Likud. By 1977 he served as a military judge. By 1979 he was appointed as a Magistrate judge. By 1984 he made District judge.
Levy's main expertise was criminal law, and he stood out as a strict and efficient judge. Among other things, he directed the highly publicized and overheated trial of Yigal Amir, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin,[1] and made sure that the trial should be a regular criminal trial, which was at the same time both praised and criticized.
He was appointed to the Supreme Court in August 2001 along with Ayala Procaccia. The kippah wearing Levy was perceived as representing the Religious Zionists, an antithesis to the anti religious views represented by Procaccia. In practice, the approach of the two judges is actually very similar, but Levy is considered more of an activist judge then Procaccia.
On March 24, Levy was elected by the Supreme Court justices to serve on the Judicial Selection Committee[2] in place of the court's Vice-President Eliezer Rivlin.
The main expertise of Levy is criminal justice.[1] Among other things, Levy wrote the ruling in Ze'ev Rosenstein's extradition to the United States, wherein he recognized the legality of extraditing an Israeli citizen that his committed offenses were connected to the territory of a foreign country.
Levy is considered to be an activist judge, and was always ready when he felt it necessary to intervene in administrative and governmental decisions (including Knesset laws), even in cases where the court usually does not get involved.[1] This led him to write many court opinions as the single dissenting judge. For example, Levy was the only judge that ruled, in the minority, that the law reducing the social security benefits is illegal.[1]
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