The Way We Do Things Back Home: Do Expatriate Judges Preferentially Cite the Jurisprudence of Their Home Countries?

Abstract

This study considers ‘expatriate model’ judicial systems, whereby some or all of the judges that sit on a country’s courts are nationals of a foreign state. The author explores whether these foreign judges ‘favour’ their home jurisdiction by inflating the number of citations to judgments of the courts of their home countries. The study focuses on the citations of Commonwealth judges from England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, in the courts of eight pacific states: Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. The study concludes that the nationality of an expatriate judge does have some effect on the nationality of the foreign case law that they tend to cite.