32 - Cross-Border Judicial Dialogue

Summary

Our understanding of cross-border judicial dialogue is dominated by the Global North, especially the analysis of the European judicial space, which has limited application outside Europe, and ‘global judicial dialogue’, which is a rather asymmetric phenomenon: Global South courts such as the South African and Colombian constitutional courts cite totemic Western courts such as the US and German courts with far greater frequency than vice versa. This chapter seeks to enhance our understanding of judicial dialogue from the African and Latin American perspectives, nuancing what dialogue means in Global South contexts by comparing the different patterns and facilitating conditions in these regions, including the impact of shared languages and legal traditions, the development of regional integration projects, and pan-regional democratic development. It is argued that leading national courts play highly significant roles in fostering intra-regional dialogue but can also hamper such dialogue by prioritising global extra-regional interlocutors in their citation practices and reproducing global dynamics through asymmetric citation patterns at the intra-regional level. While this pattern highlights the difficulty of de-centring and challenging Global North epistemic dominance in the arena of judicial dialogue, it also suggests that considered changes in judicial, practitioner, and scholarly practice and collaboration can disrupt these dynamics and generate more inclusive dialogue.