Transnational Judicial Dialogue as an Organisational Field

Abstract

AbstractOver the last few decades, judges and courts have had an important role in global governance. They also now communicate with each other more than they used to. Scholars have named this phenomenon ‘the transnational judicial dialogue.’ This paper calls for a comprehensive understanding of this judicial dialogue in a way that will explain the influence it has on courts. This paper proposes to use the concept of organisational fields, developed by DiMaggio and Powell, to study the relationships between courts. It will be seen that this concept gives a fuller account of those relationships and their effects than the existing approaches. This paper will first show that the transnational organisational field of the courts is now emerging using the four criteria of structuration. Then, the paper will discuss three examples of how this concept can contribute to the study of transnational relationships between courts.