Judicial Power in Domestic and International Legal Institutions. [PDF]

Although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide political science into sub elds, rigid boundaries remain, especially in some contexts. In this essay, we suggest that the most important assumption that suggests a divide between international relations and comparative politics, that international politics is characterized by anarchy whereas domestic politics is characterized by hierarchy, continues to be invoked commonly in research on judicial power. We contend that we will learn more, and do so more quickly, if we relax this assumption and recognize the substantial similarities between domestic and international research on this question. In making this argument, we review the problem of enforcement at the inter- national and domestic levels and discuss whether a rigid boundary between scholarship on judicial power in international and domestic politics can be sustained on either theoretical or empirical grounds.