The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has two regional court systems, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court and the Caribbean Court of Justice. A product of political and economic integration, each court has taken a different evolutionary path resulting in different constitutional arrangements, but neither make nationality a criterion for appointment to judicial office. This chapter considers the concept of ‘foreignness’ in relation to these two regional Caribbean courts. It draws on the results of structured interviews with judicial officers and attorneys from across the region to analyse perceptions about the significance of judges’ nationality to the quality of judging and public expectations. The findings suggest that – in the Caribbean context which is shaped by regionalism, small communities and the legacies of colonialism – nationality does not matter as much as the impartiality, competency, and efficiency of the judge.

Foreign judging in the small jurisdictions in the Anglo Caribbean is ubiquitous and diverse. It is evident in extraterritorial and hybrid courts and a diverse group of foreign judicial officers. This chapter defines foreign judging to include intra- and extra-Caribbean personnel and institutions and complicates the image of the foreign judge as entirely an outsider. The chapter traces ways in which foreign judging has refined understandings of judicial independence in the Caribbean. It examines the dynamics of the two apex extraterritorial courts, one a surviving imperial court (the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council) and the other a more modern decolonisation-driven treaty-based court (the Caribbean Court of Justice). The chapter looks at how conceptions of judicial tenure until retirement are upended by mobile judges who serve consecutively or concurrently in more than one jurisdiction. It also explores how the stringent requirements for removal of a judge are recalibrated by the heightened scrutiny of judicial conduct in small jurisdictions.

The afterword brings the various questions raised through colonial law and literature into the contemporary era. In it, I reflect on the book’s overarching argument and attempt to orient its conclusions toward the present and future. It is difficult, for example, to read the recent ruling by the Supreme Court undoing the prohibition of homosexuality in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code as a predictable outcome of the structuring logic of colonial law. At the same time, it is equally unexpected as a consequence of contemporary Indian nationalism. Thinking about the unruly history of the “unnatural offence” that Section 377 seeks to prohibit helps reframe the legal narrative outside any teleological recourse to progress and tradition. In this vein, the afterword examines a range of flashpoints in contemporary Indian law in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the intersection of law and narrativity.