Not so long ago, reading the decisions of a foreign court was a genuine chore. The opinions weren’t available, and even finding which case might be worth your time was its own small ordeal. A lawyer generally had access to the federal reporters and the reporters of your own state, and beyond that the law of the wider world was effectively closed to you. But times have changed. Courts everywhere have gone digital, and between the internet and a translation app you can now watch an oral argument from Mexico, read a brief from South Africa, or follow a judgment from Sweden or Australia without leaving your desk.
I had exactly that experience recently with a decision by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. The dispute was, on its surface, a small one. An oat-drink company had registered “post-milk generation” as a trademark for its oat-based products. The trade association for the British dairy industry, Dairy UK, objected. A statute provided that the “designation” of milk may not be used for products that do not come from an animal. The oat milk company’s answer was straightforward: It was not naming its product “milk,” so surely the rule did not reach it. Rather, the product was being labelled post-milk. The U.K. Supreme Court disagreed. “Designation,” it held, has a broad meaning—it covers any use of the word in relation to the product, not merely the product’s name—and so “post-milk generation” was off the table.
What could I get from reading a foreign case that doesn’t and mostly can’t apply to any of my clients? The first thing is the chance to read law without the weight of our own polarization. These days, lawyers are always tempted to read judicial opinions—and the Supreme Court of the United States’ above all—with a political hat firmly on. Does the decision make us angry or not? Did the judges appointed by this president or that one play to type or break from their priors? Read a foreign judgment and all of that falls away. The political fights of some other country are not ours to litigate, and we have no team to root for. What is left is something quieter and more useful: The judicial craft itself, laid bare without the partisan static we have unfortunately learned to hear underneath every American opinion.
And there is a great deal of craft to admire. United Kingdom judgments are written in a spare style that uses almost none of the color American judging has come to favor. There are no pop-culture references for our British cousins, no rhetorical fireworks, few zingers. The oat-milk judgment was handed down quickly after argument and runs short, and it is the better for both. The reasoning simply proceeds. British judgments are also ruthlessly organized, and that means more than the numbered paragraphs everyone notices first. The opinions are built so that the logic advances in order, each step resting on the one before it, so that by the end you have been walked rather than dragged to the result. There is a deeper benefit, too.
It helps to read law written by a wholly different sort of legislature and interpreted by a wholly different sort of judiciary. The questions they ask are not quite our questions, and the moves they make are not quite our moves. Sitting with that difference for an hour stretches the mind. It reminds you that the way American courts do things is a set of choices and not the natural order of the universe—and once you see your own system as a set of choices, you start to read it more clearly.
Law can be a parochial business, and appellate practice especially so. We are licensed in our own jurisdictions, we cite our own authorities, and it is easy to spend an entire career inside a fairly small world. But the walls of that world have become unexpectedly thin. For the price of an internet connection, we can read the work of our colleagues in London or Pretoria or Sydney, learn from how they think, and carry a little of it home with us. The next brief I write will not cite Dairy UK v. Oatly, but it may be a touch leaner and a touch better organized for the time I spent there. That is an extraordinary opportunity.