Cosmopolitan courts and strange laws: Essays on judicial globalization and the social resistance to foreign law

This dissertation, which examines the globalization of constitutional law via judicial institutions, proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding the interactions between high courts around the world and how the United States' public understands the use of foreign law in American courts. I argue that the world is becoming more aware of cosmopolitan courts (courts that look beyond provincial law when deciding domestic cases). The dissertation relies on three different original qualitative data sets. The first is an analysis of speeches delivered by justices of the Supreme Court focused on understanding how they legitimate their citations to foreign law. The analysis reveals that the justices understand the use of foreign law as a means of legal learning and judicial diplomacy. The second data set is a collection of the universe of foreign and international opinions that have cited to the US Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education . A content analysis of these data reveal that foreign court's citation to Brown has led to legal innovation in judicial decisions.;Additionally, I conduct a qualitative content analysis of the Senate confirmation hearings of US Supreme Court nominees Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan and typologize the ways in which politicians reference and characterize judicial use of foreign law. This analysis explores American politicians´ to a backlash to cosmopolitan activities which has led to the social transformation of foreign law into a dangerous stranger. Drawing on the work of Georg Simmel, I label the product of the transformation of foreign law as strange laws. The dissertation links this transformation to other conservative movements that have constructed foreign national immigrants as illegal strangers who should be feared. My work argues that foreign laws and decisions are a new American stranger.