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22 Eur. Pub. L. 171 (2016)
Comparative Reasoning in European Supreme Courts

handle is hein.kluwer/epl0022 and id is 179 raw text is: BOOK REVIEWS Michal Bobek, Comparative Reasoning in European Supreme Courts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ISBN 978-0-19-968038-2, viii + 310 pp., GBP 53 (hb) Studying the comparative reasoning of courts -judicial dialogues'- has been one of the more fashionable topics in legal academia over the past decade. Bobek's book is a valuable contribution to the study of this topic, fact-checking the practice of judicial comparisons through a study of supreme court decisions in England and Wales, France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This methodological choice is itself to be applauded, as it constitutes a rich sample of rather diverse jurisdictions, including the latter two, which have been less studied in comparative constitutional scholarship. The book's main contribution is that it forces us to reconsider the manner in which we tend to think about such comparative reasoning, in particular the frequency with which it occurs, its explicitness and function. Bobek recognizes the increased attention judicial comparison has recently triggered. As he puts it 'Doing comparative law in courts today is a tricky business. A practice that has been used by adjudicators for centuries and for decades found itself outside of any sustained scholarly attention had been witnessing a veritable boom in interest in the last two decades or so.' (p. 1). His own enquiry specifically consists in the verification whether supreme national jurisdictions' reliance on comparative materials can really be adequately be described as a new phenomenon or one that is on the rise. The author seeks to address this question by a methodological approach that combines an empirical and a theoretical enquiry. He solely considers non-mandatory references to foreign law by a national judge interpreting domestic law for the purpose of solving a domestic dispute. His work does not examine the separate issue of mandatory references to foreign law, such as for instance under South Africa's constitutional framework that compels courts to refer to other legal systems under some circumstances.1 The book, moreover, does not engage with any normative assessment of the practice. As the author himself states, the work is 'inductive. It has no prior preconceptions or normative visions as to how judges Under s. 39 of the South African Constitution courts must consider international law and may consider foreign law when interpreting the Bill of Rights. 'Book Reviews'. European Public Law 22, no. 1 (2016): 171 184. © 2016 Kluwer Law International BV, The Netherlands

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