Recent Posts

Disaster Displacement: Gaps in International Norms

There is an interesting interview with Professor Walter Kahlin, former Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, on disaster displacement over at the IPI’s Global Observatory. He discusses why the current international law regime on refugees is incomplete when it comes to displacement.  He explains: Back in 2010, Haiti was hit by one of the most...

Weekly News Wrap: Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Suspected Islamist militants killed at least 60 people in an attack on a village in northeast Nigeria, while a separate attack killed eight people at a teacher training college.  Nigeria will mount a massive security operation to protect a World Economic Forum on Africa planned in Abuja next...

Now in Paperback: The Oxford Guide to Treaties

Just a quick note to flag for interested readers that Oxford has released a paperback version of my book, The Oxford Guide to Treaties.  Happily, it is significantly cheaper than the hardback version -- it's listed for under $60 on Amazon right now.  I hope that this edition will interest non-institutional buyers for whom the earlier price tag was a bit steep....

Weekly News Wrap: Monday, April 7, 2014

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa French and African soldiers serving in Central African Republic are "overwhelmed" by the "state of anarchy" in the country, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said a day after Chadian troops began withdrawing from the peacekeeping mission.  Nigeria has overtaken South Africa as Africa's largest economy after a rebasing calculation...

Events and announcements: April 6, 2014

Event The United Nations Law Committee of the International Law Association, American Branch, along with The George Washington University Law School, invite you to a brownbag lunch panel on Treaty Survival on Wednesday, April 9, 2014, 1:00 – 2:15 PM in the Moot Court Room, The George Washington University Law School, 2000 H St. NW, Washington DC, 20052. This panel will address the effectiveness of treaties over time, with...

Weekend Roundup: March 29-April 4, 2014

This week on Opinio Juris, Julian wondered if the ICJ's judgment in the Whaling in the Antarctic would ring in the end of the Whale Wars. He also curiously awaits the release of the Philippines memorial filed with the PCA in the UNCLOS arbitration against China and assessed China's reaction to the submission. Meanwhile, Kevin handed out advice on how to get yourself convicted of...

HILJ Online Symposium: Suzanne Katzenstein Responds to Karen J. Alter

[Suzanne Katzenstein is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Duke University School of Law.] This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Thank you to Opinio Juris and the Harvard Journal of International Law for hosting this exchange and to Karen Alter for her thoughtful comments. My article’s central question is why governments create global international courts or, put more precisely, why some government attempts to create such courts succeed and other attempts fail. I evaluate all attempts at international courts that I could identify that reached the multilateral treaty negotiation or treaty drafting stage. This amounted to four successful and seven failed attempts at establishing courts invested with general jurisdiction or relating to international criminal law, the law of the sea, and human rights. The dominant explanation for the creation of international courts focuses on the functional incentives of governments, such as the need to overcome collective action problems or to signal credibility. I argue that the functional explanation provides insufficient insight into the successes and failures of the proposals I study. I evaluate two additional explanations. The first focuses on the preferences of the most powerful states, the UK and the US. I propose a second that emphasizes the role of legal crises and international lawyers. During periods of legal crisis, governments are more willing to cooperate with one another in order to bring stability back to the legal and political order; and they are also more receptive to the proposals for international courts made by international lawyers. Neither the power nor the crisis argument fully explains the eleven attempts analyzed in the article. Not surprisingly, history is too complex. But taken together, the two explanations provide substantial insight into ten of the eleven cases, and into the creation of international courts across the 20th century. Alter rightly notes that I define international courts and tribunals narrowly—as only those institutions that are open to any state to join. This means I exclude both regional and ad hoc criminal tribunals. I do so not only for the sake of feasibility but also because I assume that state concerns about protecting their sovereignty are distinct in those contexts. States, for instance, retain more control over the design and operation of regional than they do of fully international courts (for example in the area of judicial appointments), and most state officials are not subjected to the jurisdiction of the ad hoc criminal tribunals they help create. In addition, current scholarship, including Alter’s own work, persuasively shows that the creation of regional courts has been influenced both by region-specific dynamics as well as cross-regional emulation. I make three other important definitional and scope choices. I study only those proposals that reach the multilateral treaty drafting or treaty negotiation stage. These attempts seemed to have a real chance at succeeding. I define “success” as courts with treaties that actually entered into force. Finally, I also exclude tribunals that deal solely with economic disputes, such as trade and investment disputes. Here, my assumption is that powerful states—those with the largest markets—enjoy unique bargaining leverage during negotiations.

HILJ Online Symposium: Hague Peace Conference Courts v. The Universe of International Courts

[Karen J. Alter is a Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University. Alter’s most recent book is The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2014).] This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Suzanne Katzenstein’s article is a very welcome systematic investigation of the Hague era and post-Cold War proposals to generate international courts ("ICs"). Katzenstein puts her finger on a serious problem in the literature on international courts. Scholars are biased towards success, since it is hard to build a career by focusing on what does not exist for most to see. Katzenstein is correct in pointing out the limitations of our scholarly biases. Indeed the only way to understand what leads to IC creation is to give equal weight to both successful and unsuccessful efforts. Researching abandoned initiatives, however, is not so easy to do. One can find references to publicly voiced ideas and formed proposals that fail, but these references tend to be brief and anecdotal. Moreover, many ideas are voiced but then abandoned, leaving not even a paper trail. The dearth of deep secondary literatures regarding failed initiatives makes it is extremely hard to construct a universe of cases, let alone develop and test arguments that might explain why some proposals are abandoned. During what I call the Hague Peace Talk era, however, proponents developed a grand vision for a network of international courts. Katzenstein thus has a period of time in which she can investigate abandoned and successful endeavors, side by side. She then traces what happened to these initiatives over time. Her analysis deftly summarizes this landscape of successful and failed global initiatives across the twentieth century. I especially appreciate this article’s many tables that really help us see patterns as well as what became of various proposals.