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We Are the World: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Use of Foreign Sources of Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2014

Ryan C. Black ,
Ryan J. Owens  and
Jennifer L. Brookhart
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Abstract

The United States Supreme Court recently employed foreign legal sources to interpret U.S. law, provoking widespread political and legal controversy. Scholars have yet to examine systematically the conditions under which justices cite foreign law, however. Applying theoretical approaches from international relations and judicial politics scholarship, we search every Supreme Court opinion between 1953 and 2009 for references to foreign law. Justices strategically reference foreign law to prop up their most controversial opinions. They also borrow law from countries whose domestic political institutions are viewed as legitimate; and, surprisingly, conservatives are as likely as liberals to cite foreign law. These findings add important information to the discussion over citing foreign law, and highlight how geopolitical context influences domestic legal policy.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , October 2016 , pp. 891 - 913
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, Michigan State University (email: rcblack@msu.edu); Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison (email: rjowens@wisc.edu; Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison (email: jbrookhart@wisc.edu). Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association (2010), the Southwestern Political Science Association (2008), and the Southern Political Science Association (2008). The authors wish to thank Tom Hansford, John McClain, and Jon Pevehouse for providing helpful comments, and gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Amanda Bryan. Data replication sets and online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi: 10.1017/S0007123414000490.

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