April 2013

LJIL Symposium: A Reply to the Comments by Andreas Føllesdal and Ruti Teitel

[Armin von Bogdandy is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Ingo Venzke is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, University of Amsterdam.] This post is part of our symposium on the latest issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. We are truly grateful to Andreas Føllesdal and Ruti Teitel for their perceptive comments on our article, On the Functions of International Courts: An Appraisal in Light of Their Burgeoning Public Authority. Their insights will surely inform our continuous work on the multi-functionality, public authority, and democratic legitimacy of international courts and tribunals (ICTs). In this reply, we will focus on three main points to which both commentators draw attention: our understanding of functions; why ICTs require democratic legitimacy; and, finally, whose interests matter for a normative assessment.

Functional Analysis

Both commentators challenge us to clarify what we want to achieve with our functional analysis and, at the same time, suggest nuances to the four functions we do identify. Andreas Føllesdal specifically prompts us to choose - do we want to explain why ICTs exist, or do we see functions as legitimating the practice of ICTs? If either one or the other was our ambition we would indeed fall short of giving a convincing answer. But our functional analysis stands in a sociological tradition and aims at a better understanding of the phenomenon (cf., M. Madsen, ‘Sociological Approaches to International Courts’, in K. Alter, C. Romano, and Y. Shany (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication, 2013). We are not (neo-) functionalists, and neither develop an explanation of institutional developments nor a functional justification. Especially the latter point merits emphasis; a functional analysis does not — it cannot — justify the phenomenon it tries to understand (N. Luhmann, Legitimation durch Verfahren, 1983). But it might still be seen as potentially apologetic to frame a certain social consequence of an institution’s characteristic activity as a function. Because of this looming hazard, we keep the straightforward normative questions in sight. In fact, our functional analysis serves as a precursor for discussing the democratic legitimation of an ICT’s exercise of public authority. It aims at a better understanding of the phenomenon to sharpen normative questions. Against the backdrop of an orthodox understanding of ICTs, which sees ICTs in the function of dispute settlement alone, we identify three more main functions: (1) the stabilization of normative expectations, (2) law-making, and, (3) the control as well as legitimation of public authority exercised by other actors. Ruti Teitel argues that ICTs pursue a further function — and find a more promising source of legitimacy than we are ready to acknowledge — in the development and protection of specific substantive values at the international level. Furthermore, she submits that ICTs step in and serve the values in domestic settings when national authorities have broken down. While it concerns the postulation of another function, it is true that this dimension of ICTs’ activity, especially of international criminal tribunals, is only weakly reflected in our summary analysis that draws together different ICTs on a high level of abstraction.

LJIL Symposium: A Consideration of ‘On the Functions of International Courts: An Appraisal in Light of Their Burgeoning Public Authority’

[Ruti Teitel, Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School, Visiting Professor, London School of Economics, and Affiliated Visiting Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.] This post is part of our symposium on the latest issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Armin Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke...

LJIL Symposium: Explaining and Justifying International Courts as Agents and Actors: Comments on von Bogdandy and Venzke’s ‘On the Functions of International Courts’

[Andreas Føllesdal is Professor at Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo] This post is part of our symposium on the latest issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. The expansive growth and influence of international courts, tribunals, and quasi-judicial bodies (ICTs) fuels well deserved interest across disciplines far beyond public international law, including political science and political philosophy. How are we to describe, explain, and assess this partial abdication of sovereignty by the main actors of a (formerly) state-centric world order?  Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke have again joined forces to illuminate these profound issues of the functions and legitimacy of ICTs, tying together and expanding on previous valuable insights (von Bogdandy and Venzke, 2011). Von Bogdandy and Venzke diagnose some previous scholarship of ICTs as suffering from a two-fold myopia. Scholars have tended to focus on only one social function of international courts, and on a single source of legitimation: dispute settlement and state consent. Von Bogdandy and Venzke start with the plausible and well-argued observation that ICTs now cause impact in ways far beyond that of instruments for settling disputes among their creators. These further functions stabilize normative expectations by several means: law making; judicial interpretation; and, the control and (hence) legitimation of other authorities (cf, Alter 2013). Von Bogdandy and Venzke furthermore identify intriguing and far-reaching challenges of ICTs to the state-centred world order paradigm. Three further supplemental and partially competing traditions are those that see ICTs as  agents (‘organs’) of a world community, ‘institutions’ of legal regimes, and as actors who exercise public authority. Implications range from the reduced salience of state consent as the main mode of legitimation of international law and courts, entailing ‘restrictive interpretation’ to the appropriate role of amici curiae briefs and the need to differentiate modes of legitimation amongst the ICTs. The following observations from a fellow traveller point to some topics for further elaboration and development.