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30 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 89 (2017)
What Do We Mean When We Talk about Judicial Dialogue: Reflections of a Judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

handle is hein.journals/hhrj30 and id is 93 raw text is: What Do We Mean When We Talk About Judicial Dialogue?: Reflections Of A Judge Of The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor' This article discusses a phenomenon difficult to ignore in the relations among national and international courts and tribunals in the twenty-first century: judi- cial dialogue, or the practice of using the reasoning of other national or interna- tional courts to arrive at a better understanding of human rights. The article explains how (a) the judicialization of international justice and (b) the increasing incorporation of international human rights law into domestic legal systems have created a shared regulatory and functional identity among national and interna- tional judges concerning the protection of human rights. Both phenomena have been cause and effect in laying the foundations of a global judiciary that is in constant interaction. The article further argues that judicial dialogue contributes to coordi- nating this constant interaction among judges of different latitudes. To illustrate this process, the article analyzes the dialogue that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has conducted horizontally with the European Court of Human Rights, and vertically with the constitutional tribunals and supreme courts of the states parties to the American Convention on Human Rights. The article concludes by reflecting on the need for judges to maintain an open and progressive attitude toward the reconfiguration of the judicial function in the twenty-first century. I. INTRODUCTION There is an extensive literature on the subject of judicial dialogue.2 While this literature has begun to develop a general theory of the concept, 1. Judge and Vice President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Law Professor and Senior Researcher in the Legal Research Institute (Instituto de lnvestigaciones Juridicas) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). This article is the result of the reflections originally presented in a lecture at the University of Notre Dame Law School on October 1, 2014, where I had the privilege of holding the Clynes Chair in Judicial Ethics. I would like to thank Douglass Cassel (Univer- sity of Notre Dame) and Alexandra Huneeus (University of Wisconsin) for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article, and Patricia Uribe and Pablo Gonzdlez Domfnguez for their research assistance. The ideas expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily represent those of my colleagues that commented on this article, or those of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. 2. A number of articles and books have dealt with the topic of judicial dialogue. See generally Anne- Marie Slaughter, A Typology of Transjudicial Communication, 29 U. Rici-i. L. REV. 99 (1994); Francis G.

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