Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked lost out this week in the fight over the appointment of Justice Esther Hayut as president of the country’s top court, a pick she had tried to thwart. However, Shaked intends to push ahead with her plan to curb the powers of the country’s judicial branch.

On Sept. 5, Israel’s Judicial Appointments Committee elected Justice Esther Hayut to replace retiring Chief Justice Miriam Naor as president of the Supreme Court, overriding the objections of Shaked, who heads the panel. Shaked had fought for months to abolish the principle of seniority that gives the job to the longest-serving justice on the bench.

Since March, Shaked had rejected repeated requests by Naor to bring Hayut’s selection to a committee vote, generating heavy tensions among the top echelons of Israel’s legal system.

Shaked, a leading force in the right-wing HaBayit HaYehudi party, prevailed earlier this year when the Judicial Appointments Committee picked two justices identified with the Zionist religious stream among the four new appointments to the bench. The carefully crafted achievement boosted Shaked’s standing within her hard-line party as well as on the political right. The next target she set herself was to eliminate the Supreme Court’s long-standing seniority convention.