The Significance of Foreign Law: A Jamaican Case Study

Abstract Analyses of the relationships between law and society often focus exclusively on domestic laws, meaning laws that emanate from domestic sources. This approach is not necessarily appropriate in contexts that involve significant cross-border flows of ideas, information, goods, services, people, or legal authority. In these cases, there are both practical and intellectual reasons to define the set of laws to be analyzed as including all of the laws, both domestic and foreign, that affect a particular aspect of a given society. In other words, the analysis ought to focus upon sets of laws that are defined in terms of their subjects rather than their sources. A case study from Jamaica illustrates this point. The legal determinants of Jamaica’s relatively high homicide rate include many foreign laws and associated enforcement practices—most notably, US laws and practices concerning trafficking in firearms and narcotics, deportation, extradition, and cross-border fraud. Consequently, it will be difficult to understand the relationship between law and society in Jamaica without taking into account all of the laws that affect Jamaicans as opposed to just the laws adopted by Jamaican legal institutions.