International Court Authority
ISBN: 9780191836909
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Criminal Law Criminology and Criminal Justice; Public International Law;

An innovative, interdisciplinary and far-reaching examination of the actual reality of international courts, International Court Authority challenges fundamental preconceptions about when, why, and how international courts become important and authoritative actors in national, regional, and international politics. A stellar group of scholars investigate the challenges that international courts face in transforming the formal legal authority conferred by states into an actual authority in fact that is respected by potential litigants, national actors, legal communities, and publics. Alter, Helfer, and Madsen provide a novel framework for conceptualizing international court authority that focuses on the reactions and practices of these key audiences. Eighteen scholars from the disciplines of law, political science and sociology apply this framework to study thirteen international courts operating in Africa, Latin America, and Europe, as well as on a global level. Together the contributors document and explore important and interesting variations in whether the audiences that interact with international courts around the world embrace or reject the rulings of these judicial institutions.

Alter, Helfer, and Madsen's authority framework recognizes that international judges can and often do everything they 'should' do to ensure that their rulings possess the gravitas and stature that national courts enjoy. Yet even when imbued with these characteristics, the parties to the dispute, potential future litigants, and the broader set of actors that monitor and respond to the court's activities may fail to acknowledge the rulings as binding or take meaningful steps to modify their behaviour in response to them. For both specific judicial institutions, and more generally, the book documents and explains why most international courts possess de facto authority that is partial, variable, and highly dependent on a range of different audiences and contexts - and thus is highly fragile.

An introduction situates the book's unique approach to conceptualizing international court authority within theoretical debates about the authority of global institutions. International Court Authority also includes critical reflections on the authority framework from legal theorists, international relations scholars, a philosopher, and an anthropologist. The book's conclusion questions a number of widely shared assumptions about how social and political contexts facilitate or undermine international courts in developing de facto authority and political power.


Karen J. Alter, Professor of Political Science and Law, Northwestern University and iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts, University of Copenhagen, Laurence R. Helfer, Harry R. Chadwick Sr. Professor of Law, Duke University and iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts, University of Copenhagen, Mikael Rask Madsen, EURECO Professor of European Law and Integration and Director, iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts, University of Copenhagen.


Karen J. Alter, is a Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University, permanent visiting professor at the iCourts Center for Excellence, and co-director Research Group on Global Capitalism and Law. Winner of the Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim fellow, Alter is author of Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice (OUP, 2017) with Laurence R. Helfer, the award-winning The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2014), The European Courts Political Power (OUP, 2009) and Establishing the Supremacy of European Law (OUP, 2001) and more than forty-five articles and book chapters on international law. Alter is member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, the Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Organization, the American Journal of International Law, International Studies Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Journal of International Dispute Settlement.

Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law, co-director of the Center for International and Comparative Law, and a Senior Fellow with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He also serves as a Permanent Visiting Professor at the iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2014. Professor Helfer has co-authored three books, including Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice (OUP, 2017) with Karen J. Alter, and more than seventy scholarly articles on his diverse research interests relating to the interdisciplinary analysis of international laws and institutions, which include international courts and tribunals, treaty design, international human rights, and international intellectual property law. He is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and the Journal of World Intellectual Property.

Mikael Rask Madsen is Professor of European Law and Integration at the University of Copenhagen and Director of iCourts, the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for International Courts. He was formerly at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a visitor at numerous universities, including University of Strasbourg, Oxford University, and University of California at Berkeley.

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