Judicial conflicts on international law: how disagreements on EU and ECHR law align with broader divisions on the Supreme Court of Norway

How do supreme court judges’ disagreements about international law (IL) align with broader judicial conflicts? Existing research tends to frame domestic judicial conflicts on international law as a tension between sovereigntism and supranationalism. However, given that judiciaries are often characterised by internal disagreement, this paper investigates how international law aligns with broader judicial conflicts. We expect that IL interacts with domestic judicial politics, such that familiar divisions, e.g., deference to government authority or broader ideological orientations, shape how judges approach IL cases. Taking the Supreme Court of Norway as our case, we analyse the content and structure of judicial dissents in cases citing the European Convention of Human Rights and European Union law from 1990 to 2020 using Optimal Classification. We find that judicial conflicts in IL law cases align with a broader conflict related to deference to public authorities and that the line of conflict shifts depending on the issue at stake. Our results demonstrate that employing general theories of judicial politics and decision making can advance the analysis of how national courts engage with international law, cautioning against modelling judges as torn between national interest and the supranational authority of IL.