Academic

Venzke on Comparative International Dispute Resolution

By Lawrence Solum

Ingo Venzke (Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences - Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law) has posted Antinomies and Change in International Dispute Settlement: An Exercise in Comparative Procedural Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Institutions for the settlement of international disputes are products of competing interests and aspirations. They testify to rivalling and changing ideas about international order. They bear witness to incremental shifts in the antinomies that underlie their concrete shape. International judicial institutions, specifically their procedural law, respond to conceptions of what international dispute settlement is about, what it is for and what it actually does. While international adjudication could for long plausibly be understood as a sporadic affair concerned rather exclusively with the successful resolution of disputes between immediate parties, the quantitative increase in international adjudicators and in international decisions over the past two decades has gone hand in hand with a shift in quality. International courts and tribunals have developed international norms in their practice, shaping legal regimes and conditioning the legal situation of all those who are subject to the law. The article exposes multiple antinomies and change in the procedural law of key international courts and tribunals in this light. The main task will be the comparative study of recent trends in procedural law in light of legitimatory problems stemming from the systemic effects of international adjudication. Issues of transparency and publicness, third party intervention and amicus curiae submissions, and avenues of judicial review are most significant in this regard. These trends harbour valuable potentials for improvement but also considerable perils. The article concludes with a sketch of the possible future dynamics.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 17, 2011 (boomark / email).