Of Judges and Jurisdictions: An Overture to Comparative Legal Reasoning in National Case Law

“No foreign judges” is a recurrent clamor in contemporary Swiss politics. With this slogan some Swiss politicians challenge the European Supreme Court’s jurisdiction within the bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the European Union. Treaty negotiations usually associated with sober diplomacy thereby receive a strong emotional flavor. Even academic discussions on more subtle forms of how “foreign law” influences national legal discourse sometimes turn emotional: Should courts be permitted to look to foreign jurisdictions to guide their decisions, to create their arguments by comparing foreign law with their own