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Constitutional Borrowing As Jurisprudential And Political Doctrine In Shri D.K. Basu V. State Of West Bengal, Sam F. Halabi

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

The discipline of comparative constitutional law today is focused in significant part on the study of how and why judges use foreign precedent. Scholars debate the propriety of using foreign precedent as “authority,” circumstances under which such use is consistent with democracy (or a product of democratization), and which constitutional traditions may derive the greatest benefit from comparison. While comparative law theorists have long reflected on, and struggled with, a standard disciplinary vocabulary to describe what judges do when they engage in “comparative constitutional law,” the existing scholarship generally distributes judges’ use of foreign precedent into one of three modes …