Citing Foreign Law

Sill (LSU) and Routh (Cal State Stanislaus) gave an interesting paper at MWPSA on citations to foreign law in Supreme Court opinions.  (If that link doesn't work, try this one or go to the MWPSA site and do an author search, here.)  Of particular interest is their finding that Scalia is significantly more likely than many of the other justices to invoke foreign laws in the majority opinions he authors.  I would guess that most of those are to old English laws (they're working on categorizing the citations), but still, the findings are interesting.  (They also find that the justices reference foreign law more often in criminal rights cases and to reach liberal outcomes, but both Scalia and Thomas are more likely than the baseline to cite to foreign law (as are Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens).)  Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is that this is an important legal debate that, until now, has not been subjected very often (to my knowledge) to empirical analysis.  Anyone interested in discussing the findings?  (London (Pitt) conducted a related analysis of citations to foreign law by the Canadian Supreme Court.)

Comments

[David Zaring]

I've got a paper coming out in JELS on the same issue. I think it went up on SSRN circa today. For what it's worth, here's the link, and we'll be correcting the title post-haste:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=899148