[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.
