ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, American legal scholarship has turned inward, exhibiting a marked decline in engagement with foreign legal systems. This trend – termed ‘legal isolationism’ in this Article – represents a fundamental shift in the orientation of US legal thought. Drawing on a comprehensive new dataset, this Article presents the first empirical study of this phenomenon. The dataset, compiled through manual downloads, includes data on all law journal articles available on Westlaw and published through January 1, 2025, that cite at least one foreign legal system – a corpus totaling 237,272 articles. The data reveal a striking pattern: from 1995 to 2011, the number of law review articles referencing foreign law rose steadily; since then, it has undergone a sustained and significant decline. By 2023, such references had fallen to their lowest level in decades. This Article explores a range of possible explanations for the decline and subjects them to empirical scrutiny. Rather than offering praise or condemnation, it seeks to quantify, contextualize, and explain a pivotal transformation in the trajectory of American legal scholarship.
Dammann, Jens, America’s New Legal Isolationism: An Empirical Analysis (February 3, 2025), University of of Texas Law, Legal Studies Research Paper.
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