Abstract The increase in national courts’ reliance on foreign and international law sources, labeled ‘transnational communication’, has established domestic judges as influential, independent actors in the international legal arena that may promote domestic application and enforcement of international human rights. While studies on judicial globalization have emphasized the role judges play, we argue that to acquire a well-rounded understanding of judicial globalization, we should direct focus beyond judges as sole participants in this dialogue and examine other actors that affect the proliferation of transnational communication. We assess the role of litigant and amicus parties on U.S. courts’ engagement in global judicial dialogue in a twofold manner; through statistical analysis of an original dataset of international law citations in all U.S. Supreme Court litigation between 1946 and 2024, and by tracing the flow and language of citations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child through state and federal courts, as well as litigant and amicus briefs. We show that litigants and amici are significant actors in the process of judicial globalization by being more likely than judges to bring international law arguments and be the ones to initiate this dialogue, thus forcing courts to participate and interpret international legal principles.
Giallouri et al. (Tue,) studied this question.