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Guy S. Goodwin-Gill and Hélène Lambert (eds.), The Limits of Transnational Law: Refugee Law, Policy Harmonization and Judicial Dialogue in the European Union , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 280pp., ISBN 9780521198202, £54.00

The notion of the cross-fertilization between domestic jurisdictions is not a new one. Slaughter has articulated the concept of judges ‘increasingly coming to recognise each other as participants in a common judicial enterprise’,1 whether by meeting more frequently in a variety of settings or by citing each others’ decisions. In the context of the European Union, the literature to date has been focused on the dialogue, on the one hand, between European courts and national courts and, on the other, amongst the individual judges in European courts. While there have been studies published on a third category of dialogue, that which occurs between national courts, little research has been done to date with a specific focus on the substantive field of refugee law. The publication of The Limits of Transnational Law: Refugee Law, Policy Harmonization and Judicial Dialogue in the European Union is therefore a welcome development, having as its aim the exploration of prospects for ‘a transnational legal order in the context of refugee law in Europe’. Edited by Guy S. Goodwin-Gill and Hélène Lambert, the book is composed, for the most part, of a series of surveys of domestic case law in different EU member states as evidence of the use of foreign law by national judges in asylum decisions. In the introduction, Lambert explains that refugee law is a particularly interesting case study, as it has evolved mostly through judicial interpretation and it lacks an international mechanism capable of providing a common interpretation of the Refugee Convention. A transnational legal approach would be particularly useful within the European Union in the interpretation of key EU legislation of the Common European Asylum System; however, this volume reveals that European national judges rarely engage in transnational dialogue in the context of refugee law.