Survey Study of 43 Supreme Court Common Law Judges on the Use of Foreign Law in Constitutional Rights Cases (ICPSR 29121)

Version Date: Aug 31, 2010

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Principal Investigator(s):
Brian Flanagan, National University of Ireland-Maynooth; Sinead Ahern, University of Limerick

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR29121.v1

Version V1

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Summary

This is a survey study of 43 judges from the British House of Lords, the Caribbean Court of Justice, the High Court of Australia, and the Supreme Courts of Ireland, India, Israel, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States on the use of foreign law in constitutional rights cases. As the focus of attempts to both explain and justify the use of foreign law in constitutional discourse, the attitudes of apex judges are clearly at issue. The study aims to shed light on how common law judges view foreign law as a source of argument in constitutional rights matters, and how they "see" transnational sources. The data provide the basis for preliminary testing of globalist theory (associated with Anne-Marie Slaughter, Vicki Jackson and Chris McCrudden). More generally, they lend a practical insight to jurisprudential debates invoking the nature of judicial reasoning in appellate courts. We find that the conception of judges citing foreign law as a source of persuasive authority 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 revealed in a manner meeting his own methodological standard for attitudinal research.

Citation

Flanagan, Brian, and Ahern, Sinead. Survey Study of 43 Supreme Court Common Law Judges on the Use of Foreign Law in Constitutional Rights Cases. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2010-08-31. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR29121.v1

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Funding

University College Dublin. Ad Astra Research Scholarship

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

2005-12 -- 2006-04
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Universe

Approximately 43 supreme court common law judges.

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Presence of Common Scales

A 95 percent confidence interval was selected. As data were of a nominal nature, Pearson Chi squared analyses were employed in order to determine relationships between the variables.

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Original Release Date

2010-08-31

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Flanagan, Brian, and Sinead Ahern. Survey Study of 43 Supreme Court Common Law Judges on the Use of Foreign Law in Constitutional Rights Cases. ICPSR29121-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2010-08-31. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR29121.v1
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Notes

  • These data are flagged as replication datasets and are distributed exactly as they arrived from the data depositor. ICPSR has not checked or processed this material. Users should consult the investigator(s) if further information is desired.

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.