Ruiz Fabri, Nunes Chaib, Venzke, & von Bogdandy: International Judicial Legitimacy: New Voices and Approaches

Hélène Ruiz Fabri (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law; Univ. Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), André Nunes Chaib (Maastricht Univ.), Ingo Venzke (Univ. of Amsterdam - Law), & Armin von Bogdandy (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law; Goethe Univ. Frankfurt) have published International Judicial Legitimacy: New Voices and Approaches (Nomos 2020). This volume is open-access. Contents include:

• Hélène Ruiz Fabri & André Nunes Chaib, Introduction
• Alain Zamaria, Democratic Legitimacy and Non-Majoritarian Institutions: Reflections on the Functional and Democratic Legitimacy of International Adjudicative Bodies and Independent Regulatory Agencies
• Aida Torres Pérez, In Nobody's Name: A Checks and Balances Approach to International Judicial Independence
• Parvathi Menon, Not in the Name of the “Other”: The Democratic Concept of International Adjudication through the Looking Glass
• Lorenzo Gasbarri, Courtspeak: A Method to Read the Argumentative Structure Employed by the International Court of Justice in its Judgments and Advisory Opinions
• André Nunes Chaib, International Public Authority in Perspective: Comparing the Roles of Courts and International Organizations in Democratizing International Law
• Cecily Rose, The Dispute Settlement Function of the International Court of Justice in Croatia v. Serbia
• Lan Ngoc Nguyen, The Public Authority of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
• Antoine Duval, Not in My Name! Claudia Pechstein and the Post-Consensual Foundations of the Court of Arbitration for Sport
• Geraldo Vidigal, Re-Imagined Communities: The WTO Appellate Body and the Communitization of WTO Law
• Rene Urueña, The Democracy We Want: Standards of Review and Democratic Embeddedness at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
• Freya Clausen, In the name of the European Union, the Member States and/or the European citizens?
• Armin von Bogdandy & Laura Hering, In the Name of the European Club of Liberal Democracies: On the Identity, Mandate and National Buffering of the ECtHR's Case Law

Føllesdal: The Legitimacy of International Courts

Andreas Føllesdal (Univ. of Oslo - PluriCourts) has posted The Legitimacy of International Courts (Journal of Political Philosophy, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

States are free, yet everywhere live under international courts and tribunals (ICs). As they proliferate and gain power across ever more domains, ICs become targets of resistance and criticism that they are illegitimate authorities. What reasons might a state have to defer to an IC’s judgment or interpretation, even when the state regards it as mistaken, and even when it conflicts with the interests and objectives of government? Section I sketches the multiple tasks of ICs, in complex interdependence with other actors. Their core task is to adjudicate disputes through interpretation and application of international law by legal methods. This may also contribute indirectly to a range of further tasks. Section II addresses some aspects of the relation between normative legitimacy of ICs and descriptive legitimacy - actors’ beliefs therein. Section III shows how a wide range of legitimacy challenges concern ways ICs fail to carry out their tasks. This account does not seek to provide substantive arguments or seek to show that all such criticisms are correct. The aims are rather to make many such criticisms comprehensible as legitimacy concerns, to provide a rationale for popular taxonomies of legitimacy criticisms, and to indicate which premises and arguments are required for such criticisms to be sound.

Baetens: Legitimacy of Unseen Actors in International Adjudication

Freya Baetens (Universitetet i Oslo - Law) has published Legitimacy of Unseen Actors in International Adjudication (Cambridge Univ. Press 2019). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

International courts and tribunals differ in their institutional composition and functions, but a shared characteristic is their reliance on the contribution of individuals other than the judicial decision-makers themselves. Such 'unseen actors' may take the form of registrars and legal officers, but also non-lawyers such as translators and scientific experts. Unseen actors are vital to the functioning of international adjudication, exerting varying levels of influence on judicial processes and outcomes. The opaqueness of their roles, combined with the significance of judicial decisions for the parties involved as well as a wider range of stakeholders, raises questions about unseen actors' impact on the legitimacy of international dispute settlement. This book aims to answer such legitimacy questions and identify 'best practices' through a multifaceted enquiry into common connections and patterns in the institutional composition and daily practice of international courts and tribunals.

Voigt: International Judicial Practice on the Environment: Questions of Legitimacy

Christina Voigt (Univ. of Oslo - Law) has published International Judicial Practice on the Environment: Questions of Legitimacy (Cambridge Univ. Press 2019). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

More and more environmental cases are being heard and decided by international courts and tribunals which lack special environmental competence. This situation raises fundamental questions of legitimacy of the environmental practice of international courts. This book addresses inter alia questions of who has legal standing to bring an environmental claim before an international court, on which legal norms is the case decided and whether judges have the necessary expertise to adjudicate environmental cases of often complex nature. It analyses which challenges international courts face, which possibilities they have and which advances international judicial practice has been able to make in protecting the environment. Through the prism of legitimacy important insights emerge as to whether international courts and tribunals are fit for addressing some of the most pressing global challenges of our time.

Steinbrueck-Platise: Legitimate Governance as a Privilege and Price for the Autonomy of International Organisations

Mateja Steinbrueck-Platise (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law) has posted Legitimate Governance as a Privilege and Price for the Autonomy of International Organisations (in The Legal Framework of the OSCE, Mateja Steinbrück Platise, Carolyn Moser, & Anne Peters eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This paper addresses the legitimacy crisis of the OSCE beyond the well-rehearsed political debates between the participating States as to the OSCE’s institutional form, functions and structure, and situates it instead in a broader context of global governance, analysing it from the international institutional law and human rights law perspective. In a first step, the concept of autonomy is introduced as one essential element of legal personality of international organizations, but still broader in scope in that it can be identified also with organizations lacking legal personality. Since the autonomy of an organization gives rise to certain legitimate expectations as to its purpose, functioning and outcomes, some of the legitimacy standards typically appertaining to the organizations with legal personality become relevant also with respect to other international organizations, including the OSCE. In a second step, in order to assess competing efforts of participating States to justify the OSCE’s legitimacy, the paper contextualises these efforts within the global trend of questioning the legitimacy of international organizations in general. Such an approach reveals not only certain reform proposals common to various international organizations, but also, and in particular, the lack of certain proposals within the OSCE that would aim towards strengthening the OSCE’s legal framework in terms of good governance. Finally, the contribution sketches out some of the legitimacy standards that call for a reform of a range of international organizations, with the OSCE being a prime example. However, this rising normative framework applies to organizations not because they might possess international legal personality or be established by a constitutive treaty, but because they have the capacity to autonomously exercise public power over individuals and peoples at large.

Alter: The Contested Authority and Legitimacy of International Law: The State Strikes Back

Karen J. Alter (Northwestern Univ. - Political Science) has posted The Contested Authority and Legitimacy of International Law: The State Strikes Back (in Beyond Anarchy: Rule and Authority in the International System, Christopher Daase & Nicole Dietelhoff eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Written to engage IR theory debates, this chapter argues that the crafting, invocation, interpretation and application of international law are a primary means through which states collectively rule and contest politics in international relations today. Yet since international law (IL) draws its legitimacy and authority from public affirmations of and diffuse support for the rule of law, public support for the rule of law is a permissive condition for IL to be politically constraining. After explaining how national and transnational legal practices constitute international law’s de facto authority, the chapter explores both ordinary and extraordinary contestations of IL authority. Ordinary contestation takes place within a legal field, when lawyers, stakeholders, judges and government officials debate and contest over the meaning of international law. Political tactics are also part of ordinary contestation, but because the curators of IL authority are transnational, a state may be unable to impose its preferred IL interpretation. Where states fail to impose a preferred interpretation, three extra-ordinary contestation strategies can be used to escape IL authority: 1) states can seek to replace international law’s authority with domestic law’s authority; 2) states can pit different international laws against each other by maneuvering within and around international regime complexes; and (3) states can attack the legitimacy and authority of international law altogether. Where authority challenges enhance IL accountability, they are to be welcome. But each strategy can also be used to tear at the fabric of IL authority, potentially undermining the permissive conditions that make IL both constraining and effective.

Howse, Ruiz-Fabri, Ulfstein, & Zang: The Legitimacy of International Trade Courts and Tribunals

Robert Howse (New York Univ. - Law), Hélène Ruiz-Fabri (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law), Geir Ulfstein (Universitetet i Oslo), & Michelle Q. Zang (Universitetet i Oslo) have published The Legitimacy of International Trade Courts and Tribunals (Cambridge Univ. Press 2018). Contents include:

• Robert Howse, Geir Ulfstein, Hélène Ruiz-Fabri & Michelle Zang, Introduction
• Gabrielle Marcea & Reto Marco Malacrida, The WTO Adjudicating Bodies
• Pieter Jan Kuijper, The Court of Justice of the European Union
• Halvard Haukeland Fredriksen, The EFTA Court
• Donald C. Pogue, The United States Court of International Trade
• Maureen Irish, The Federal Courts of Canada
• Paula Wojcikiewicz Almeida, The Case of MERCOSUR
• Miguel Antonio Villamizar, The Andean Court of Justice
• Rilka Dragneva, The Case of the Economic Court of the CIS
• James Thuo Gathii, The COMESA Court of Justice
• Illy Ousseni, The WAEMU Court of Justice
• Michael Ewing-Chow & Ranyta Yusran, The ASEAN Trade Dispute Settlement Mechanism
• Theresa Squatrito, A Comparative Analysis of Formal Independence
• Michelle Zang, Judicial interaction of international Trade Courts and Tribunals
• Ole Kristian Fauchald, Access to Trade Tribunals – Comparative Perspectives
• Andreas Follesdal, Towards a More Just WTO: Which Justice, Whose Interpretation?
• Robert Howse, Geir Ulfstein, Hélène Ruiz-Fabri & Michelle Zang, Conclusions

Call for Papers: Responding to Legitimacy Challenges: Opportunities and Choices for the European Court of Human Rights

PluriCourts at the University of Oslo has issued a call for papers for a workshop on "Responding to Legitimacy Challenges: Opportunities and Choices for the European Court of Human Rights," to take place September 21, 2018, at the European Court of Human Rights. The call is here.

Tallberg & Zürn: The Legitimacy and Legitimation of International Organizations

Jonas Tallberg (Stockholm Univ. - Political Science) & Michael Zürn (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) have posted The Legitimacy and Legitimation of International Organizations: Introduction and Framework. Here's the abstract:

While legitimacy dynamics are paramount in global governance, they have been insufficiently recognized, conceptualized, and explained in standard accounts of international cooperation. This special issue aims to spearhead the empirical study of legitimacy and legitimation in global governance. It addresses the overarching question of when, how, and why international organizations (IOs) gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy in world politics. It engages with this question comparatively, mapping and explaining patterns in legitimacy and legitimation across multiple dimensions. In this introduction, we first conceptualize legitimacy as the belief that an IO’s authority is appropriately exercised, and legitimation and delegitimation as processes of justification and contestation intended to shape such beliefs. We then theorize sources of variation in legitimation processes and legitimacy beliefs, with a particular focus on the authority, procedures, and performances of IOs. Finally, we describe the methods used to empirically study legitimacy and legitimation, and preview the articles of the special issue in the context of the broader research problems they address.

Galand: A Global Public Goods Perspective on the Legitimacy of the International Criminal Court

Alexandre Skander Galand (Koç Univ. - Center for Global Public Law) has posted A Global Public Goods Perspective on the Legitimacy of the International Criminal Court (Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is facing its worst crisis since its creation. At the end of 2016, three States decided to withdraw from the RS. There is a risk that the institution falls entirely apart. But, already in 2014, the Court was qualified as being in trouble as a legitimacy debate arose in the wake of a compliance debacle with respect to the situations in Sudan, Libya and Kenya. In order to achieve effective prosecutions and trials, the Court needs States’ cooperation. I will show that there are three interdependent legitimacy issues that have been raised for non-compliance with the ICC which also relate to the institutional design necessary to effectively provide a global public good. I will demonstrate that the Court’s investigations and prosecution in these three States is affected by source, procedural and outcome legitimacy eroding factors. Due to the entanglement between source and procedural legitimacy we may have to consider tying both. On first glance, a compliance pull could be generated by, when source legitimacy is lacking, strictly sticking to the State’s interest in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion as to who to prosecute. The paper will argue that the latter option would create a global public bad, as it entails negative externalities and excludes some victims from benefiting from the Court. Nonetheless, the paper will show that such calculations are already made with regards to so-called self-referrals, i.e. where source legitimacy is not questioned. With respect to outcome legitimacy, the paper will argue that the ICC is a victim of the SC inability to exercise the responsibility assign to it by the UN Charter and the Rome Statute.

Dutton: Bridging the Legitimacy Divide: The International Criminal Court's Domestic Perception Challenge

Yvonne Dutton (Indiana Univ., Indianapolis - Law) has posted Bridging the Legitimacy Divide: The International Criminal Court's Domestic Perception Challenge (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

International institutions like the International Criminal Court (ICC) face significant hurdles that can prevent them from establishing their legitimacy with far-away audiences. The hurdles become almost insurmountable when the ICC intervenes over the government’s objection. This Article explores various factors that may influence the perceived legitimacy of international tribunals. It concludes that because the ICC faces access and communication disadvantages vis-à-vis state leaders, the ICC’s road to achieving domestic perception legitimacy will be a difficult one. Without significant and pervasive in-person outreach, the ICC will probably not be able to overcome any propaganda campaign government leaders wage against it to protect themselves and their cohort from being held accountable to the victims of violence. Yet the literature identifies in-person outreach as the best way to promote a far-removed audience’s awareness and understanding of an international court’s operations and processes, especially because those audiences are likely socialized to distrust judicial institutions. Even with access, the ICC still must overcome cross-cultural communication barriers. State leaders, by contrast, share in-group status with their citizenry. A case study of Kenya, using both documentary and interview evidence, illustrates the ICC’s domestic perception legitimacy challenge. After the ICC brought charges against them for committing crimes against humanity, Kenyan leaders fought back, besieging the public with rhetoric that painted the ICC as biased against Africa and a tool of colonialism. Enough Kenyans were apparently persuaded by the rhetoric that they backed leaders charged by the ICC with serious international crimes instead of supporting the ICC’s efforts to provide justice for Kenya’s victims. To avoid such a situation in the future, states and other stakeholders need to help spread and advance the ICC’s embodied norms of justice and accountability so that those norms are internalized by domestic audiences. This path to achieving domestic perception legitimacy will take time, but the payoff is that the ICC might be able to fulfill its goals.

Føllesdal: Constitutionalization, Not Democratization: How to Assess the Legitimacy of International Courts

Andreas Føllesdal (Univ. of Oslo - Law) has posted Constitutionalization, Not Democratization: How to Assess the Legitimacy of International Courts (in The Legitimacy of International Courts, Nienke Grossman, Harlan Grant Cohen, Andreas Føllesdal, & Geir Ulfstein eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Several authors - including Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke, Allan Buchanan and Robert Keohane, Gráinne De Búrca, and Nienke Grossman address the legitimacy deficits of international courts (ICs). They propose the 'democratization' of ICs, by which they often mean to increase their transparency, accountability or participation by various parties. There are other, better reasons to value transparency, accountability and participation concerning ICs than as building blocks of democracy, namely insofar as they contribute to valuable forms of constitutionalization of the global basic structure. More transparency, accountability or participation is often but not always beneficial. Moreover, they can be valuable even when such changes do not advance democracy of the kind worth having: widely dispersed institutionalized control in the form of elections based on prior public deliberation, whereby individuals can influence the rules that shape their lives. We should not assume that democracy is the touchstone for all legitimate modes of governance. Three related issues should be isolated to foster constructive discussions and sound extrapolation of normative premises for legitimacy familiar from domestic constitutional thought and political theory. We should distinguish between democratic institutions of decision-making, the normative principles that justify such institutions, and important features of such institutions that contribute to their justification, such as accountability, participation and transparency. It is only calls for the first of these – formalized institutions of decision-making – which should be considered democratication proper.

Call for Papers: The Legitimacy of "Unseen Actors" in International Adjudication (Reminder)

PluriCourts Centre of Excellence at the University of Oslo and the Europa Instituut at Leiden University have issued a call for papers for a conference on "The Legitimacy of 'Unseen Actors' in International Adjudication," which will take place October 26-27, 2017, in The Hague. The deadline is May 31, 2017. The call is here. Here's the idea:

‘Unseen actors’ are central to the ‘institutional makeup’ of international courts and tribunals as registries and secretariats, law clerks and legal officers may exert varying levels of influence on the judicial process. At this conference, legal and political science scholars and members of adjudicatory institutions will consider and discuss the legitimacy of assigning ‘unseen actors’ certain roles in the judicial process as well as the implications thereof for the legitimacy of the dispute settlement mechanism as such.

Føllesdal: The Legitimate Authority of International Courts and Its Limits: A Challenge to Raz's Service Conception?

Andreas Føllesdal (Univ. of Oslo - Law) has posted The Legitimate Authority of International Courts and Its Limits: A Challenge to Raz's Service Conception? (in Legal Authority Beyond the State, P. Capps, H. Palmer Olsen & S. Toddington eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Very public challenges to international courts (ICs) by state governments, legislatures, domestic or international courts, corporations, investors or civil society groups are often draped in terms of ‘legitimacy’. The challenges provoke several questions. Why should such ‘compliance constituencies’ defer to ICs’ judgments at all? More precisely: when do ICs’ judgments give such constituencies reason to act differently than they would otherwise – and when do they not? The present contribution argues that states’ disobedience may be justified due to the substantive contents of the particular ruling by an IC. Section 1 provides a brief sketch of Raz’s ‘Service account’ of legitimacy, and addresses some criticisms relevant to our concerns. Section 2 brings this account to bear on ICs, and lays out some of its distinguishing features by comparing it to the influential accounts of Daniel Bodansky and Yuval Shany. Section 3 turns to consider how this account accommodates and even justifies cases of disobedience against ICs.

Føllesdal: Towards a More Just WTO: Which Justice, Whose Interpretation?

Andreas Føllesdal (Univ. of Oslo - Law) has posted Towards a More Just WTO: Which Justice, Whose Interpretation? (in The Legitimacy of International Trade Tribunals, Robert Howse, Helene Ruiz Fabri, Qingzi Zang, Ole Kristian Fauchald & Geir Ulfstein eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Advertisement

The WTO is often criticized as promoting global injustice. Critics of many such protests against the WTO may firstly dismiss the objections as ‘category mistakes’, holding that standards of justice cannot apply to entities such as the WTO system. A second line of response would be that even granting that there are such risks, several reform proposals are ill-founded. To alleviate whatever injustice the WTO system is complicit in, less radical changes than fundamental treaty changes may suffice.

Advertisement

The present chapter challenges the first of these counter-arguments, and supports the second, as regards WTO and global distribute justice. The chapter leaves urgent issues of the environment and many human rights concerns aside – though some of the arguments are also relevant for some of these issues. The focus is on the WTO dispute settlement mechanism (DSM, ‘Mechanism’), especially the adjudicatory panels and the Appellate Body (‘AB’).

Advertisement

This article has three main objectives. It firstly defends the diagnoses that the WTO system contributes to global distributive injustice, against some potentially devastating criticisms. The substantive contents of the principles of global justice are not central to the arguments, but to fix ideas the next section of this introduction sketches the contours of such principles.

The second objective is to challenge the prescriptions many critics hitherto have promoted, for two main reasons. Section 4 argues that principles of global justice for the GBS as a whole drastically underdetermine reform proposals for the Mechanism. Furthermore, many critics underestimate the scope of discretion international judges and panel members enjoy in interpreting and specifying treaties. The upshot is that broad scale reforms may be neither possible nor effective – but also not necessary. Radical treaty changes are unlikely since many of them require consensus among states. Instead, the AB may change its interpretative practice to make significant moves toward a more just WTO system. The third contribution, in sections 5 and 6, is to start to explore ways that the existing WTO system may become more just if members of the panels and of the AB develop their interpretive standards in one or more of four ways.

Cohen, Føllesdal, Grossman, & Ulfstein: Introduction: Legitimacy and International Courts

Harlan Grant Cohen (Univ. of Georgia - Law), Andreas Føllesdal (Univ. of Oslo - Law), & Nienke Grossman (Univ. of Baltimore - Law), & Geir Ulfstein (Univ. of Oslo - Law) have posted Introduction: Legitimacy and International Courts (in Legitimacy and International Courts, Harlan Grant Cohen, Andreas Føllesdal, Nienke Grossman, & Geir Ulfstein eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Legitimacy and International Courts examines the underpinnings of legitimacy, or the justification of the authority, of international courts and tribunals. It brings together an esteemed group of authors, noted for both their expertise in individual courts, tribunals, or other adjudicatory bodies, and their work on legitimacy, effectiveness, and governance more broadly, to consider the legitimacy of international courts from a comparative perspective. Authors explore what strengthens and weakens the legitimacy of various different international courts, while also considering broader theories of international court legitimacy. Some chapters highlight the sociological or normative legitimacy of specific courts or tribunals, while others address cross-cutting issues such as representation, democracy, independence and effectiveness.

This Introduction surveys some of the key contributions of this volume and distills some of the lessons of its varied chapters for the legitimacy of international courts. Parts II and III are largely conceptual in approach, exploring what legitimacy means for each and all of the courts. Part IV takes a more functional approach, exploring how various factors internal or external to particular courts have contributed to those courts’ normative or sociological legitimacy. Part V provides thumbnail summaries of each the chapters that follow.

Stone Sweet & Grisel: The Evolution of International Arbitration: Judicialization, Governance, Legitimacy

Alec Stone Sweet (National Univ. of Singapore - Law) & Florian Grisel (King's College London - Law) have published The Evolution of International Arbitration: Judicialization, Governance, Legitimacy (Oxford Univ. Press 2017). Here's the abstract:

The development of international arbitration as an autonomous legal order is one of the most remarkable stories of institution building at the global level over the past century. Today, transnational firms and states settle their most important commercial and investment disputes not in courts, but in arbitral centres, a tightly networked set of organizations that compete with one another for docket, resources, and influence.

In this book, Alec Stone Sweet and Florian Grisel show that international arbitration has undergone a self-sustaining process of institutional evolution that has steadily enhanced arbitral authority. This judicialization process was sustained by the explosion of trade and investment, which generated a steady stream of high stakes disputes, and the efforts of elite arbitrators and the major centres to construct arbitration as a viable substitute for litigation in domestic courts. For their part, state officials (as legislators and treaty makers), and national judges (as enforcers of arbitral awards), have not just adapted to the expansion of arbitration; they have heavily invested in it, extending the arbitral order's reach and effectiveness. Arbitration's very success has, nonetheless, raised serious questions about its legitimacy as a mode of transnational governance.

The book provides a clear causal theory of judicialization using original data and analysis, and a broad, relatively non-technical overview of the evolution of the arbitral order. Each chapter compares international commercial and investor-state arbitration, across clearly specified measures of judicialization and governance. Topics include: the evolution of procedures; the development of precedent and the demand for appeal; balancing in the public interest; legitimacy debates and proposals for systemic reform. This book is a timely assessment of how arbitration has risen to become a key component of international economic law and why its future is far from settled.

Pollack: The Legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Union

Mark A. Pollack (Temple Univ. - Political Science and Law) has posted The Legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Here's the abstract:

This paper examines both scholarly debates and empirical evidence about the normative and sociological legitimacy of one of the oldest, busiest and most powerful international courts in the world: the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). With respect to normative legitimacy, the paper identifies and applies three criteria for international court legitimacy, namely that courts should be fair and unbiased, that their rulings should be politically acceptable and legally sound, and that they should operate openly and transparently. While the CJEU has historically enjoyed a high degree of normative legitimacy, I find, recent decades have witnessed the emergence of a vigorous debate regarding overlapping charges of bias, of judicial activism and poor legal reasoning, and of opacity at the Court. By contrast with normative legitimacy, sociological or descriptive legitimacy measures diffuse support for the Court among its various audiences. The study of public attitudes toward the Court, I argue, is highly sensitive to measurement issues, but in general paints a picture of a public support that has been historically widespread but shallow and quite fragile, and I demonstrate that this support has decreased in the past decade, as the Court has been caught up in a broader crisis of EU legitimacy.

Symposium: Effectiveness and Legitimacy of International Law

On July 22-23, 2016, the Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht and the Deutsche Universität für Verwaltungswissenschaften Speyer will co-host a symposium in honor of Christian Tomuschat on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. The theme is: "Effectiveness and Legitimacy of International Law." The program is here.

Ulfstein: The Human Rights Treaty Bodies and Legitimacy Challenges

Geir Ulfstein (Univ. of Oslo - Law) has posted The Human Rights Treaty Bodies and Legitimacy Challenges (in Legitimacy and International Courts, Nienke Grossman, Harlan Grant Cohen, Andreas Follesdal & Geir Ulfstein eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

The United Nations human rights treaty bodies, such as the Human Rights Committee, the Committee Against Torture, and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, oversee national implementation of international human rights obligations. This chapter discusses the legitimacy of the human rights treaty bodies’ court-like function of deciding cases on individual complaints.