Lord Bingham was the perfect person to address the recent Conference of World City Bar Leaders.

As Senior Law Lord, Lord Bingham has performed brilliantly in the job for which he was specifically selected in defiance of the principle of ‘buggin’s turn’, which would have given it to another. He has stitched the Human Rights Act into the fabric of our domestic law and, in doing so, aligned our jurisprudence with that of an emerging global approach. The breadth of the approach of the House of Lords under his leadership throws into stark relief the decline of its US equivalent, unsurprisingly the source of the largest group of delegates to the conference.

The declining global reach of the US Supreme Court was examined in a recent article in the New York Times. This recorded the diminishing use made of its decisions by equivalent courts. The Canadian Supreme Court now quotes its US equivalent in half as many cases as a decade ago. For the Australian equivalent, the comparable proportion was a third. The article suggested a number of reasons why this might be so. These included more competition from a greater number of comparable courts, the unpopularity of the Bush administration, and discomfort outside the US with the illiberal views of many of the justices of the Supreme Court. But, crucially, part of the reason also lies with the fact that the court itself is becoming more isolationist. It refers to fewer foreign decisions in its arguments and is less interested in global judicial developments. Michael Kirby, the charismatic Australian justice, summed it up: ‘America… is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater.’

A recent decision of the US Supreme Court illustrates this introspection, even in a case where the majority specifically challenged the hegemony of the current administration’s worldview, Boumediene v Bush. The majority of the court confirmed that habeas corpus applies to those designated as enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay. The lead judgment by Justice Kennedy covers in detail the position in a foreign jurisdiction – our own – in about 20 pages on the history of habeas corpus from Magna Carta in 1215 to the American Revolution in 1776. The references, however, look backwards – towards the individual history of the US. References to the current position in other countries, including India and Ireland, are there only to provide contrast to the US’s legacy from Great Britain.

Contrast this with one of Lord Bingham’s most celebrated decisions. In A v Secretary of State he considered the admissibility of evidence obtained by torture. This has, regrettably, a US resonance because, although it was never openly spelt out, the court was implicitly grappling with how to deal with evidence from witnesses in the custody of the US in places like Guantanamo Bay. Lord Bingham’s judgment got star billing in media around the world. Al Jazeera, for example, led on the story of the court judgment and even had room for a quote from Charles Clarke, then Home Secretary, emphasising that the UK government did not use or condone torture even though the government had unsuccessfully argued in the case that evidence obtained by torture should not be automatically excluded. This is the kind of good publicity in a delicate and crucial part of the world that money just cannot buy.

Lord Bingham’s judgment on torture not only obtained international coverage, it also demonstrated a profound international engagement. He cited no fewer than three decisions of the US Supreme Court and, in total, 12 decisions of six supreme courts around the world. He quoted the decisions of three international courts or tribunals, one UN committee and no fewer than 22 decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. The Court of Appeal had decided, albeit by a majority, that the clear position of the common law was that an allegation of duress by way of torture went to the credibility of evidence in a civil case, not its admissibility. At the time, most common lawyers would probably have agreed that this was the position on their understanding of the law. This was blown away by the conscious attempt to put the practice of the UK within a global context and to upgrade the common law to modern international standards.

Such internationalism is manifest in much of Lord Bingham’s writing. In his most recently published contribution on the rule of law, he traces its origins through Magna Carta (on which he remarked that ‘it did not embody the principles of… habeas corpus which, in its modern form, was yet to be invented’) to the US constitution. However, he also related it more widely, to the attempts to regulate armed conflict by law from the Middle Ages to the charter of the UN.

So Lord Bingham was exactly the right man for the City of London Law Society to place before the Conference of World City Bar Leaders. In a context in which we are all acutely aware of the international interdependence of politics and economics, no judge better articulates the necessary counterbalance of a global approach to the rule of law and human rights. Hopefully, Lord Bingham’s retirement will provide no change in the developing jurisprudence of what is now the Supreme Court. There is no doubt, however, that he is a hard act to follow.

Roger Smith is director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice