"שיח בין מומחים": השפעתה של הכתיבה הפובליציסטית על שופטות ושופטים בישראל

This article is based on the PhD thesis of the late Dr. Tal Laor, a promising young scholar of law and media, who passed away before her time and whose outstanding academic talent is sorely missed. Laor’s research explored the influence of the Israeli media in general, and of articles by legal experts in particular, on the country’s judges.Her main research question was: do professional legal articles published in the Israeli media influence judges’ rulings, and if so, how?The study drew on mixed methods. The quantitative segment is based on a statistical questionnaire circulated in 2015 among 700 judges in Israel, assessing their media consumption, as well as their stand regarding the influence of the media, including legal articles, on their decision making. Dr. Laor also conducted in-depth interviews with ten acclaimed judges, including two retired Supreme Court chief justices who presided over high-profile trials that garnered significant media attention. She also became the first researcher to sort, scan and analyze 1,300 Israeli court rulings that included citations from legal media articles.Dr. Laor’s findings depict the multifaceted influence of the media on judges in Israel. A majority of the judges (53.7%) thought that the media affects judicial conduct, but 58.2% claimed that they themselves were not influenced by professional legal articles in the media; 55.2% asserted that it is legitimate to be influenced by legal articles. While only 22 of the 1,300 court rulings scanned in the scope of this research contained citations from legal articles, those that did were presented as legitimate professional references for judicial writing.It is impossible to draw conclusions about the media’s impact on judges in Israel based on Laor’s quantitative findings. Their detailed answers in the interviews present a contradictory image of how, if at all, legal articles impact their rulings. On the one hand, judges consider legal articles to be highly intellectual journalism. On the other,this positive perception is only one part of a larger and overwhelmingly negative attitude toward the Israeli media in general, which the judges perceive to be biased and infected by commercial motives. Moreover, their answers downplay the very notion that the media has any influence on their individual rulings.Following my 2012 study on this topic in Israel, it appears that Laor’s research also supports the assumption that a limited process of mediatization has penetrated the legal sphere in Israel.