Flanagan, Brian and Ahern, Sinead (2011) Judicial Decision-Making and Transnational Law: A Survey of Common Law Supreme Court Judges. International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 60. pp. 1-28. ISSN 0020-5893

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Abstract

This is a survey study of 43 judges from the British House of Lords, the Caribbean Court of Justice, the High Court of Australia, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and the Supreme Courts of Ireland, India, Israel, Canada, New Zealand and the United States on the use of foreign law in constitutional rights cases. We find that the conception of apex judges citing foreign law as a source of persuasive authority (associated with Anne-Marie Slaughter, Vicki Jackson and Chris McCrudden) is of limited application. Citational opportunism and the aspiration to membership of an emerging international ‘guild’ appear to be equally important strands in judicial attitudes towards foreign law. We argue that their presence is at odds with Ronald Dworkin’s theory of legal objectivity, and is revealed in a manner meeting his own methodological standard for attitudinal research

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Judicial Decision-Making; Transnational Law; Common Law; Supreme Court Judges;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Law
Item ID:	2979
Depositing User:	Brian Flanagan
Date Deposited:	20 Jan 2012 09:12
Journal or Publication Title:	International and Comparative Law Quarterly
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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