Article on Filing Amicus Curiae Briefs in Other Countries

The website DipLawMatic Dialogues has a fascinating recent article called Can You Do That? Filing Amicus Curiae Briefs in Other Countries.

Among other things, it looks at strategies for finding facta filed by intervenors in courts that are not in their country of origin:

"Whether or not it is a salutary trend for NGOs to wield increasing influence upon national courts is a topic that inspires much debate and diversity of opinion. But to even get to the point of discussing the pros and cons, you need to find the briefs in the first place to know what you’re dealing with. Here are some strategies that have worked for me:

• In jurisdictions that have adopted formal submission rules, there are likely to be indicia of filing. Having a document number, or even a docket number, is an enormous help when you’re researching in unfamiliar jurisdictions.
• In jurisdictions that don’t have formal submission rules, you may need to trawl through the news sites and legal journals of the local bar associations (...)
• If you know that you’re looking for a brief from a particular NGO, chances are decent that they will have published the brief on their own website along with a press release describing the case (...)
• INTA has put together a handy chart on filing amicus briefs in Latin American jurisdictions. Helpfully for researchers, it indicates which courts do and do not accept amici and at what level (e.g. Supreme Court only).
• Of course, you can always find foreign governments’ amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court, for comparison’s sake—but you already know how to do that."