The rulings handed down by former Supreme Court President Justice Aharon Barak in the three months of grace following his physical retirement will be recognized far into the future. In the large community of court rulings, like sand on the seashore, here is the last family of the Barak dynasty, crowding together, strutting self-importantly back and forth, a strange group of penguins with short legs and large, wobbly bellies. They hardly resemble Barak's first offspring, who look at them in wonder and ask, "Are we from the same family?"

Barak's rulings have never been svelte and have always been somewhat geeky and gangly. Just as the best student in the class, wearing gym clothes that have long gone out of fashion, cannot be expected to win the 60-meter dash, so Barak's rulings have never tried to compete with the fleet-footed rulings of Yoel Sussman or the triathlon champions of Mishael Cheshin, which run, lift weights and jump high above human understanding.

The last ruling that Barak handed down was in the matter of the policy of targeted assassinations, which Barak insists on calling, with a definite lack of charm: "preventive attack that causes the death of terrorists, and sometimes also that of innocent civilians." Two days earlier Barak, on a bench of nine justices, issued a decision that canceled an amendment to the Civil Wrongs Law that prohibited compensation claims against the state for deaths, injuries and economic damages caused by the Israel Defense Forces in "non-war" operations.

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These very constitutional rulings, President Barak's swan song, should have resounded like the choir of angels of the seventh heaven of justice, right next to the Seat of Honor. Constitutional law is the supreme poetics of the law; it begins with the material and soars to the essence of law in a society that aspires to justice. In the constitutional ode all the strings are stretched to the utmost limit and the range of sound is infinite, profound sadness and unattainable joy mingled together. For this we waited, four years for the targeted assassination ruling, one year for the intifada suits ruling.

Both were worthy of culminating the term of the great diva of constitutional law. Instead, we got a penguin, in constitutional law language that resembles, more than anything else, the instructions for assembling a children's bed from Ikea: three steps, each of which contains two sub-stages - whether the right is protected in a Basic Law, whether the right is harmed by the law, whether the damage was intended for a worthy aim, whether the means causing the damage were proportional and so on and so forth - and if you follow the instructions you will end up with a bed that stands on four legs but is endowed with neither splendor nor glory.

The language is the first evidence of the disgrace, the way a liar's face turns red, revealing ugly pores and stubble. That is what happened to Barak's language. An example from the intifada damages ruling: For the first and only time, Barak speaks in a ruling about the harm and damage we cause to the Palestinian civilian population in non-war actions: "The injured are seriously harmed, they become seriously crippled, their ability to earn a living is seriously harmed." Oh dear, everything is so seriously serious and serious and serious and there is no other word to describe the hell on earth that begins three kilometers from the Supreme Court. The singer stutters, the sound bounces back from the walls hoarse and hollow. It is the same in the ruling on targeted assassinations.

Not a single cliche is excluded from the strange, disproportionate belly of the penguin, from the thundering cannon, the silent Muses and the end justifying the means to defensive democracy, a ruling that takes up 55 pages, a dense medley of citations upon citations - and is a very thin ruling, a gaunt skeleton in the body of a fat penguin. Many of the citations are from Barak himself, like the snake that holds its tail in its mouth.

It is hard to pluck from these rulings an independent statement that stands courageously on its own legs - looking squarely at the deeds of IDF soldiers, listening to the cries of the injured, accompanying the funeral processions and seeking the wretched infant's crib among the ruins of the demolished houses. The citation is the refuge of the judge who flees from personal responsibility; he conjures up his judicial ancestors and enlists their voices to silence the weeping that rises in the dark night of the law.

Thus Barak bid farewell to the occupied territories that throughout all his years in the Supreme Court were under the protection of the Supreme Court. The years of the occupation have engendered a terrible monster - policies of targeted assassinations, the composing of hit-lists, the creation of a hierarchy of authorizations to murder, policies that abolish personal responsibility for murder and replace it with the banality of a bureaucracy of murder.

And in the very last ruling that was issued in his name, Barak has nothing to say about this, and chooses to sum up his judicial career in the Supreme Court in the words that conclude the ruling: "Therefore it has been decided that it is not to be determined in advance that every targeted assassination is prohibited under customary international law, just as it is not to be determined in advance that every targeted assassination is permissible under customary international law. The laws of targeted assassination are determined in customary international law, and the constitutionality of each individual interception must be determined in the light of them."

What is Justice Barak saying? These are his words of farewell to us, this is what hides behind proportionality and reasonableness and the Canadian Constitution and the Jewish and democratic state and the instructions for assembling a homemade constitution that is made up of three parts, that whatever is legal is permissible and whatever is not legal is prohibited.

The writer is an attorney specializing in human and civil rights.