The Chief Justice of the Wiscosnsin Supreme Court, in the United States, recounts how counsel for the plaintiff cited case-law from Florida and Canada in a case before the court. Counsel for the defendant sought to distinguish the Florida authority but the Canadian case, in the language of the Chief Justice, ‘was an entirely different matter altogether’. The defence brief ‘noted archly’ that ‘[p]etitioner is not aware if Canadian case law has precedential value in the United States’. In the result, the Canadian case was not relied upon by the court, and this example of judicial reticence before extra-national law was repeated in a case of the United States Supreme Court, in which a justice of the court declared that ‘comparative analysis is inappropriate to the task of interpreting a constitution’.

Comparative legal studies, at least in the contemporary judicial world, would therefore be incompatible with the nationalist legal heritage, and the autonomous legal systems of the world would be engaged in autonomous, though surely evolutionary, legal development. Yet, this synchronic and particularist view of the relations between national and extra-national law may not capture past or future relations between local and distant law, nor for that matter the experience of other jurisdictions in the world. There would, therefore, be need for both retrospective and prospective consideration of the subject. Expansion of the national experiences may also be instructive.