The Impact of the EU Court of Justice on the Israeli Legal System

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of the author on the impact of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the Israeli legal system. It is part of a wider research directed by the author on the external impact of the CJEU on legal systems outside the EU. Most of this paper deals with citations of CJEU cases by Israeli courts and tribunals and the impact that these cases had on the outcome of the case and on Israeli law in general. It presents the statistics of these citations over the years, the types of tribunals that cite the CJEU, and the fields of law where these citations are mostly found, and it lists the CJEU cases that are more cited by Israeli tribunals. It also assesses the impact of the citations by a coding system that allows us to observe the relative influence that the citations had in the various tribunals. After having presented a statistic overview on the citation patterns, the article zooms into some specific cases where the CJEU was cited in order to put the citation into context and better understand its significance. In the final part, the paper discusses instances of CJEU impact on Israeli regulation, not case law, namely in the field of sports (the Bosman case) and privacy (“the right to be forgotten”). All in all, the paper finds an impact of the CJEU that is growing in recent years, in particular in the fields of Trade Marks, Competition Law and Labour Law, but lately also in Immigration Law and Fundamental Rights.

Keywords: EU Court of Justice, European Union, Israel

JEL Classification: K21, K40, F15, F60