Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 Comparative Law in European Supreme Courts: Why is Nobody Interested in Originalism? Comparative Law In European Supreme Courts: Why Is Nobody Interested In Originalism?

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The use of comparative reasoning in judicial decision-making has stirred considerable academic debate over the last decade, in particular in the U. S. There, the debate on the use of “foreign law” in especially the Supreme Court has been by far more voluminous than the use itself. By contrast, in European national supreme courts (the UK, France, Germany, and the Czech Republic taken as samples), the trend is quite the reverse: the foreign influence is considerable with limited or no debate on it. The fact that for instance the French Conseil d´Etat copies something from the UK Supreme Court or that the Czech Constitutional Court copied entire areas of case law from the German Bundesverfassungsgericht stirs no attention whatsoever. The aim of the lecture is twofold: firstly, to look at the facts, i.e. A quantitative view at the practice of the use of non-mandatory foreign authority in the reasoning of European supreme jurisdictions. Secondly, to explain these facts against the historical and social background of the evolution of legal theory and practice in (especially Continental) Europe of the last century: why is no one bothered by a practice which is the subject of very heated debates elsewhere?

Michal Bobek [Ph.D. European University Institute, 2011] is an Anglo-German Fellow in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford Faculty of Law, where he teaches European Union law. He is also member of St Edmund Hall. He has qualified as a judge in the Czech Republic. He worked for four years as legal assistant to the Chief Justice and served also as the head of the Research and Documentation Department at the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic, advising judges on European Union law, comparative law and human rights issues. He co-founded and presided the Czech Society for European and Comparative Law (Czech national association of International Federation of European Law – FIDE). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Soudní rozhledy (C.H. Beck), Právní rozhledy (C.H. Beck); of the Scientific Board of the Revista Română de Drept European; and former editor in-chief of the Common Law Review, Prague. His areas of interest include various aspects of European Union law, European human rights law, comparative public law and legal theory. He is the author, co-author or editor of nine books, two academic commentaries and dozens of articles and case notes, published world-wide in Czech, English, French and German, with works translated also into Rumanian, Polish and Russian. He teaches EU law not just to students, but also judges, attorneys and legal practitioners. He is external lecturer at both, the Czech as well as Slovak Judicial Academy and also lecturing for a number of Czech public institutions, law firms, NGOs, but also for instance law officials in the Georgian Parliament and Government in Tbilisi in the framework of TACIS programme of the European Commission.