Conclusion

Summary

Five years after the Polinsky and Shavell article that we opened the book with, the movie Spotlight came out. Spotlight won the 2015 Oscar for best film by telling a compelling story about investigative reporters holding the Catholic Church to account over child sex abuse. Yet as I was watching the movie, I could not help but see law-and-reputation themes in almost every scene. The Boston Globe’s Spotlight reporters could not have done it alone. The legal system helped them. The Globe reporters spotted the pattern of abuse by looking at numbers of lawsuits filed against individual priests. They revealed the cover-up by getting internal church documents from motions attached to court files. Spotlight is therefore not really a story about investigative journalism holding the powerful to account. It is rather a story about interactions between the media and the courts. Between law and reputation.