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Should courts consider cases from other jurisdictions? The use of foreign law precedent has sparked considerable debate in the United States, and this question is also controversially discussed in Europe. In this article and within the larger research project from which it has developed, we study the dialogue between different European supreme courts quantitatively. Using legal databases in Austria, Belgium, England and Wales,France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, we have hand-collected a dataset of transnational citations between the highest courts of these countries for the time between 2000 and 2007. In the present article we show that citation of foreign law by supreme courts is not an isolated phenomenon in Europe, but happens on a regular basis. We found 1,430 instances in which these courts have cited the supreme courts of the other nine countries. The majority of these citations have been made for purely comparative reasons. We also undertook regression analysis in order to understand the differences between the cross-citations. Whether such citations take place and in what quantity depends on the particular legal culture and its relationship to others. Austria and Ireland, which stand in an asymmetric relationship with Germany and England respectively, seem to be particularly receptive to foreign influence on their legal systems. But even controlling for these outliers, we have been able to identify that the population of the cited country and a low level of corruption, native languages and language skills, legal origins and families, and cultural and political factors all matter for which courts are likely to be cited. More specifically, knowledge of the language of the cited court appears to be a more important factor driving cross-citations than legal traditions, culture or politics. Thus, to facilitate a transnational market of legal ideas, it can be suggested that courts should strive to make their decisions available in languages that possible readers understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research considers the citations to Supreme Court opinions issued over a ten year period of the Rehnquist Court. It traces the citations to those opinions received over the ten years following their issuance, broken down into total citations, significant positive citations, and negative citations. Nearly all categories of citations were positively associated, suggesting that certain features influence all types of citations at all court levels, though Supreme Court negative citations appeared to diminish the overall influence of opinions. The type of case was an important determinant of the citations received, especially by lower courts, where civil rights and other types of decisions received more citation. The vote margin in the case was not a significant predictor of citations, but conservative opinions consistently received more citations than liberal opinions, during this era. Opinion author proved significant, and the most dramatic findings were the much higher citation rates associated with Justice Scalia's opinions for the Court, including negative citations. This finding survived controls for case type and ideological direction and suggests that some feature of Scalia's opinions makes them especially powerful precedents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]