The impact of the court of justice of the european union on the israeli legal system

This chapter presents the findings of the author on the impact of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the Israeli legal system. After a short description of the Israeli legal system and its judiciary, including figures on the use of foreign legal sources by the courts, the chapter describes briefly the relations between the EU and Israel and notes the weak legal approximation provision in the Association Agreement. Despite the lack of obligation on Israel’s part to rely on CJEU judgments, the author has found steadily growing numbers of citations of these judgments by various Israeli courts and tribunals. The chapter 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 (mainly in trade marks, competition law, and labour law). It also lists the CJEU cases that are most cited by Israeli tribunals. It then 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 chapter zooms into some specific cases where the CJEU was cited in order to put the citation into context and better understand its significance. Finally, the chapter discusses instances of CJEU impact on Israeli regulation, not case law, namely in the field of competition law, sports (the Bosman case), and privacy (‘the right to be forgotten’).