Experiments in International Adjudication
Historical Accounts

Examines many seminal experiments in international adjudication and the origins of several major existing international courts.

Ignacio de la Rasilla (Edited by), Jorge E. Viñuales (Edited by)

9781108474948, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 2019

338 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

'Most readers will be enriched … will have learned about a new institution, an unknown conflict or case, or about missed opportunities in dispute settlement. … they taught me a lot (e.g. about Commonwealth and Maghreb tribunals) and often made me think.' Christian J. Tams, Journal of the History of International Law

The history of international adjudication is all too often presented as a triumphalist narrative of normative and institutional progress that casts aside its uncomfortable memories, its darker legacies and its historical failures. In this narrative, the bulk of 'trials' and 'errors' is left in the dark, confined to oblivion or left for erudition to recall as a curiosity. Written by an interdisciplinary group of lawyers, historians and social scientists, this volume relies on the rich and largely unexplored archive of institutional and legal experimentation since the late nineteenth century to shed new light on the history of international adjudication. It combines contextual accounts of failed, or aborted, as well as of 'successful' experiments to clarify our understanding of the past and present of international adjudication.

Part I. International Adjudication – An Ever-Present History: 1. Experiments in international adjudication – past and present Jorge E. Viñuales
2. The turn to the history of international adjudication Ignacio de la Rasilla
Part II. Experiments in Dispute-Specific Adjudication: 3. Imperial consolidation through arbitration: territorial and boundary disputes In Africa (1870–1914) Inge Van Hulle
4. How to prevent a war and alienate lawyers – the peculiar case of the 1905 North Sea Incident Commission Jan Lemnitzer
5. The Arbitral tribunal for Upper Silesia: an early success in international adjudication Gerard Conway
Part III. Context-Specific Redress Mechanisms: 6. Mixed claim commissions and the once centrality of the protection of aliens Frédéric Mégret
7. The general claims commission (Mexico and the United States) and the invention of international responsibility Jean d'Aspremont
8. Mirage in the desert: regional judicialization in the Arab world Cesare P. R. Romano
Part IV. The Quest for a Permanent Court: 9. Saving face: the political work of the permanent court of arbitration (1902–1914) Andrei Mamolea
10. First to rise and first to fall: the Court of Cartago (1907–1918) Freya Baetens
11. The failure of the 1930 tribunal of the British Commonwealth of Nations: a conflict between international and constitutional law Donal Coffey
Part V. Experiments in specialised courts: 12. The intellectual foundations of the European Court of Human Rights Angelo Junior Golia and Ludovic Hennebel
13. From international law to a constitutionalist dream? The history of European law and the European Court of Justice, 1950–1993 Morten Rasmussen.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], International law [LB], Legal history [LAZ], Law [L], International relations [JPS]