Legal Commentary

Occasionally in my research I happen upon a book or article written by a legal scholar from England, Australia, or Canada that is germane to my own research. The author is often someone I have never heard of and that I have not (that I remember) seen cited elsewhere on the topic.

Now, this may just be a confession of my own parochialism, but it occurs to me that there is very little dialogue or cross-pollination in legal scholarship, even among the Anglophone, common-law countries. I probably couldn't even tell you if there are any "big names" in legal scholarship in my field from other countries.

Of course, there may be reasons for this in certain fields (i.e., legal doctrine in certain areas may be so different across different countries that the legal scholarship of other countries simply isn't useful), and it just may not hold true in other fields (is international law more international? Or comparative law?). But in my area of scholarship -- constitutional law -- there is no reason in principle why scholars from other countries may not have something useful to say to us, particularly since many of their constitutional provisions are similar to ours. I am not talking about doing "comparative law" as such. But there is no reason we can't benefit from the scholarship of international (or at least British, Australian, etc.) scholars on, say, the philosophical underpinnings of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, or of religious freedom, or whether the right to choose abortion should be grounded in notions of privacy, equality, or something else. Yet that scholarship is exceedingly unlikely to come to our attention unless the author publishes in US law reviews or perhaps spends time teaching and visiting in American law schools.

The only exception I can think of is with respect to bona fide "legal philosophers" - think Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Jeremy Waldron - but even those folks have spent a lot of time teaching in the US. Is it time for legal scholarship to become more wordly? At least among those of us who think the Supreme Court is being small-minded when it refuses to look at judicial decisions from other countries? Or are the practical barriers (access to the scholarship, sheer quantity of reading material) simply too great?