Tawfik, Myra J. “No Longer Living in Splendid Isolation: The Globalization of National Courts and the Internationalization of Intellectual Property Law.” Queen’s Law Journal 32 2 (2007): 573-601. Print.

Tawfik uses this journal article to achieve two purposes.  First, she is interested in establishing a coherent definition of “transjudicialism” or the reference and application of foreign laws in domestic court cases.  Despite having been confined primarily to human rights cases and constitutional matters, transjudicialism is increasingly being used to prosecute intellectual property cases.  Second, Tawfik is interested in demonstrating how the Canadian courts system is progressively employing transjudicialist principles to intellectual property litigation.  Though the author doesn’t necessarily believe this is wrong, she does raise some salient questions about the process.  These questions include: 1)  Which foreign laws are being implemented and are they credible?; 2) how can foreign bodies of law be weighed against one another to determine which is valid and should foreign litigation precedence be valued in domestic courts and; 3) should transjudicialist IP law be treated differently from human rights law or constitutional law?

After tracing the development of transjudicialism, or “transjudicial communication,” through numerous court cases in the Canadian system, Tawfik considers how Canadian Supreme Court Justice Binnie authored decisions in the copyright cases of Theberge and Harvard Mouse.  Specifically, the author considers how Binnie used non-binding foreign technical law documents as benchmarks from which to measure current Canadian copyright legislation.  According to Tawfik, this move by Justice Binnie reveals a new policy in dealing with intellectual property rights in the globalized, international age.  In these two cases, Binnie sought out “comparable or like-minded jurisdictions” in other countries to find a common ground on which to base his decision.  For Tawik, this process raises multiple questions about the application of intellectual property rights regimes in a transnational context; furthermore, the author is also concerned about which intellectual property regimes are “legitimized” in the face of competing understandings of intellectual property from diverse areas like Brazil, East Asian countries, and the Middle East.