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When and why do judges use inspiration from other systems in solving cases in national law? This book examines the frequency and the genuine practice of cross-border judicial dialogue in contemporary Europe. It evaluates these findings and asks what they mean for our understanding of judicial reasoning and judicial function today.
About the author
Michal Bobek is Professor of European Law at the College of Europe. Formerly Anglo-German Fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford, he remains associated with the Institute. He qualified as judge in the Czech Republic and worked as legal secretary to the President of the Supreme Administrative Court, where he also headed the Research and Documentation Department of the Court.
Summary
The last two decades have witnessed an exponential growth in debates on the use of foreign law by courts. Different labels have been attached to the same phenomenon: judges drawing inspiration from outside of their national legal systems for solving purely domestic disputes. By doing so, the judges are said to engage in cross-border judicial dialogues. They are creating a larger, transnational community of judges.
This book puts similar claims to test in relation to highest national jurisdictions (supreme and constitutional courts) in Europe today. How often and why do judges choose to draw inspiration from foreign materials in solving domestic cases? The book addresses these questions from both an empirical and a theoretical angle. Empirically, the genuine use of comparative arguments by national highest courts in five European jurisdictions is examined: England and Wales, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. On the basis of comparative discussion of the practice and its national theoretical underpinning in these and partially also in other European systems, an overreaching theoretical framework for the current judicial use of comparative arguments is developed.
Drawing on the author's own past judicial experience in a national supreme court, this book is a critical account of judicial engagement with foreign authority in Europe today. The sober middle ground inductively conceptualized and presented in this book provides solid jurisprudential foundations for the ongoing use of comparative arguments by courts as well as its further scholarly discussion.
Additional text
This book offers a significant contribution to both the jurisprudence of legal reasoning and to the study of the role of comparative law in legal development. The analysis is sophisticated ... It merits careful study by those engaged in the practice of undertaking and using comparative law.
