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'International Court Authority' challenges fundamental preconceptions about when, why, and how international courts become important and authoritative actors in national, regional and international politics. Examining global and regional bodies, this volume investigates how political and social contexts shape the authority of international courts.

Forty years ago, the small and underdeveloped nations on the mountainous western edge of South America formed a regional integration pact to promote economic growth, regulate foreign investment, and harmonize national laws. Overall, their enterprise has not turned out well. Riven by political schisms, economic shocks, and weak domestic legal and judicial systems, the five principal countries of the Andean Community—Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador,Peru, and Venezuela— have failed to live up to their potential as South America's second largest trading bloc. The member states have relaunched the Andean integration project and revised its policies on multiple occasions, with at best only mixed results. Not surprisingly, most commentators have ignored the Andean Community or dismissed it as a failure.

The Andean Community - a forty-year-old regional integration pact of small developing countries in South America - is widely viewed as a failure. In this Article, we show that the Andean Community has in fact achieved remarkable success within one part of its legal system. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is the world's third most active international court, with over 1400 rulings issued to date. Over 90% of those rulings concern intellectual property (IP). The ATJ has helped to establish IP as a rule of law island in the Andean Community where national judges, administrative officials, and private parties actively participate in regional litigation and conform their behavior to Andean IP rules. In the vast seas surrounding this island, by contrast, Andean rules remain riddled with exceptions, under-enforced, and often circumvented by domestic actors. We explain how the ATJ helped to construct the IP rule of law island and why litigation has not spilled over to other issue areas regulated by the Andean Community. Our analysis makes four broad contributions to international law and international relations scholarship. First, we adopt and apply a broad definition of an effective rule of law, using qualitative and quantitative analysis to explain how the Andean legal system contributes to changing national decision-making in favor of compliance with Andean rules. Our definition and our explanation of the ATJ's contributions to constructing an effective rule of law provide a model that can be replicated elsewhere. Second, we explain how the Andean legal system has helped domestic IP administrative agencies in the region resist pressures for stronger IP protection from national executives, the United States, and American corporations. We emphasize the importance of these agencies rather than domestic judges as key constituencies that have facilitated the emergence of an effective rule of law for IP. As a result of the agencies' actions, Andean IP rules remain more closely tailored to the economic and social needs of developing counties than do the IP rules of the Community's regional neighbors. Third, the reality that the ATJ is effective, but only within a single issue area, makes the Andean experience of broader theoretical interest. We offer an explanation for why Andean legal integration has not extended beyond IP. But our answer suggests avenues for additional research. We note that Andean IP rules are more specific than other areas of Andean law and that most administrative agencies in the region lack the autonomy needed to serve as compliance partners for ATJ rulings. We also find that, outside of IP, the ATJ is unwilling to issue the sort of purposive interpretations that encourages private parties to invoke Andean rules in litigation. The result is both a lack of demand for and supply of ATJ rulings. Fourth, our study of the Andean legal system provides new evidence to assess three competing theories of effective international adjudication - theories that ascribe effectiveness to the design of international legal systems, to the ability of member states to sanction international judges, and to domestic legal and political factors. We also explore the possibility that rule of law islands may be emerging in other treaty-based systems subject to the jurisdiction of international tribunals.

AbstractThis article introduces a Thematic Section and theorizes the multiple ways that judicializing international relations shifts power away from national executives and legislatures toward litigants, judges, arbitrators, and other nonstate decision-makers. We identify two preconditions for judicialization to occur—(1) delegation to an adjudicatory body charged with applying designated legal rules, and (2) legal rights-claiming by actors who bring—or threaten to bring—a complaint to one or more of these bodies. We classify the adjudicatory bodies that do and do not contribute to judicializing international relations, including but not limited to international courts. We then explain how rights-claiming initiates a process for authoritatively determining past violations of the law, identifying remedies for those violations, and preventing future violations. Because judicializing international relations occurs in multiple phases, in multiple locations, and involves multiple actors as decision-makers, governments often do not control the timing, nature, or extent to which political and policy decisions are adjudicated. Delegation—and the associated choice of institutional design features—is thus only the first step in a chain of processes that determine how a diverse array of nonstate actors influence politically consequential decisions.

AbstractSeveral prominent human rights treaties seek to minimize violations during emergencies by authorizing states to "derogate"—that is, to suspend certain civil and political liberties—in response to crises. The drafters of these treaties envisioned that international restrictions on derogations, together with international notification and monitoring mechanisms, would limit rights suspensions during emergencies. This article analyzes the behavior of derogating countries using new global data sets of derogations and states of emergency from 1976 to 2007. We argue that derogations are a rational response to domestic political uncertainty. They enable governments facing serious threats to buy time and legal breathing space from voters, courts, and interest groups to confront crises while signaling to these audiences that rights deviations are temporary and lawful. Our findings have implications for studies of treaty design and flexibility mechanisms, and compliance with international human rights agreements.