Many scholars, especially international law scholars, bemoan American legal scholarship's "inward turn"--that is, an increased disengagement with foreign legal systems and foreign law over time. In a recent paper, America's New Legal Isolationism: An Empirical Analysis, Jens Dammann (Texas) documents this trend with data drawn from Westlaw between 1995-2023 (N=237,272). Indeed, the figure (below) illustrates a palpable decline since 2011 in the number of articles published in student-edited law reviews that "reference at least one foreign legal system."
While the paper's main purpose is to descriptively document this trend, the discussion also explores a range of potential explanations, including the United States' economic dominance in the post-financial crisis era and a resurgence of political isolationism in the United States.