Regional collaboration between states is increasingly vital to address the challenges of our time. Yet many regions struggle to collaborate effectively. Comparative regional law can contribute to effective regional collaboration. But it can also make a valuable contribution to the discipline of (comparative) law more generally, especially to rethinking the connection between law and the state, and better connecting our legal discipline to empirical methods. This contribution first sets out some key challenges for comparative regional law. For example, how to validly compare regions with vast and vital differences in history, (legal) culture, geography, language, and economies, and avoid pitfalls like EU-centrism or colonialism. As always in comparative law, no single perfect answer or method exists to address these challenges. Yet this contribution aims to help stock the comparative toolbox, so that researchers can pick and combine the proper methodological tools for the research questions they want to pursue. The main claim therefore is that, considering the nature of regional law, a functionalist method, complemented and checked by more critical methods, might often be a suitable approach. If done carefully, like two hedgehogs making love, comparing regional law can then produce academically and practically valuable results.

Our understanding of cross-border judicial dialogue is dominated by the Global North, especially the analysis of the European judicial space, which has limited application outside Europe, and ‘global judicial dialogue’, which is a rather asymmetric phenomenon: Global South courts such as the South African and Colombian constitutional courts cite totemic Western courts such as the US and German courts with far greater frequency than vice versa. This chapter seeks to enhance our understanding of judicial dialogue from the African and Latin American perspectives, nuancing what dialogue means in Global South contexts by comparing the different patterns and facilitating conditions in these regions, including the impact of shared languages and legal traditions, the development of regional integration projects, and pan-regional democratic development. It is argued that leading national courts play highly significant roles in fostering intra-regional dialogue but can also hamper such dialogue by prioritising global extra-regional interlocutors in their citation practices and reproducing global dynamics through asymmetric citation patterns at the intra-regional level. While this pattern highlights the difficulty of de-centring and challenging Global North epistemic dominance in the arena of judicial dialogue, it also suggests that considered changes in judicial, practitioner, and scholarly practice and collaboration can disrupt these dynamics and generate more inclusive dialogue.