25 Apr The ICJ Gets Help — Law Clerks On the Way
UVA Law School announced today that one of its graduates, Najwa Nabti, has won the inaugural Orrick International Law Fellowship to serve as a law clerk to the International Court of Justice.
The Orrick International Law Fellowship is sponsored by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, an international law firm with offices in the United States, Europe and Japan, and is administered by the U.Va. School of Law at the invitation of the World Court. U.Va. law students and recent graduates may apply for nomination by the School of Law; if the nominee is offered a clerkship, the Orrick International Fellowship underwrites their success.
Congratulations to Ms. Nabti! It is a bit odd, I suppose, to have the salaries for the law clerks underwritten by a private law firm, but the chances of Orrick appearing before the ICJ is not terribly high. And having a few extra folks around might help the ICJ move a bit faster on those pending opinions.
UPDATE: Marko Milanovic has a nice comment below. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that the ICJ has not had law clerks before. But this is a new way of funding ICJ law clerks, which suggests to me that there will be more law clerks in the future than there are now. Which, I agree, is unlikely to make a big difference.
As for the ICJ’s slowness, that is one of my self-indulgent tropes, but not without foundation. It is true that states sometimes delay ICJ proceedings, but it is still remarkable how long the ICJ takes from the time the case is submitted before it issues an opinion (sometimes it takes years). The states don’t control that schedule. So extra law clerks could only help!
Julian,
Law clerks (or trainees) have been working at the ICJ for a couple of years now (and some of them have actually been posting at your blog). If the proceedings before the ICJ have not moved faster by now, I doubt this year’s clerks will make a difference. Or, it may just be that any delays in the ICJ’s cases are not actually the fault of the ICJ itself, but that of the states parties who actually want or in some other wat cause the delays: see the Congo v. France case as an example at
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/icof/icofframe.htm
Regards,
Marko Milanovic
Marko,
The Bosnian Genocide case may be an extreme case in point, see the history of the proceedings recounted here. Of course, the Kosovo cases were also somewhat protracted, mostly because Serbia and Montenegro is now on fairly good terms with the West but could not be seen domestically to discontinue the cases against NATO member states.
Also, to its credit, the ICJ has tried to streamline its proceedings with the last few Practice Directions (themselves a fairly novel concept in the ICJ), and in setting the dates for consecutive rounds of oral pleadings in some cases. There is, however, only so much that a genuinely international court can do while respecting the sovereignty and dignity of the states appearing before it (see the article by Dame Rosalyn Higgins, now of course the President of the ICJ, ‘Respecting Sovereign States and Running a Tight Courtroom, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 50 (2001), pp. 121-132).
Best regards,
Tobias