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As they relate to the Supreme Court, institutional legitimacy and policy legitimacy have most frequently been studied in isolation. In this article, a holistic framework is proposed and examined. The political capital hypothesis holds that the Supreme Court can introduce institutional support in its efforts to generate legitimacy for particular policies, but that the Court risks its institutional backing by advancing controversial edicts. Therefore, institutional legitimacy functions as an expendable political capital with which the Supreme Court can confer some increment of policy legitimacy. Two experiments are conducted to test this dynamic, with results providing strong support for the hypothesized process of legitimation.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Theoretical and structural issues -- Democracy and international governance -- Intergovernmental societies and the idea of constitutionalism -- Constitutional interpretation in international organizations -- The rationality of the use of force and the evolution of international organization -- Current issues: The changing environment of international organizations -- International organizations in a period of globalization: New (problems of ) legitimacy -- The changing image of international organizations -- International democratic culture and its sources of legitimacy: The case of collective security and peacekeeping operations i -- The legitimacy of Security Council activities under Chapter VII of the UN Charter since the end of the Cold War -- Selected contexts: International organization in transition -- The legitimacy of the World Trade Organization1 -- The process towards the new international AEnancial architecture -- Distributive justice and the World Bank: The pursuit of gender equity in the context of market reform -- Legitimacy in the real world: A case study of the developing countries, non-governmental organizations, and climate change -- Conclusion -- International organizations, the evolution of international politics, and legitimacy -- Acronyms -- Contributors -- Index.

The rapid ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the orderly election of its judges and prosecutor belie the radical nature of the new institution. The Court has jurisdiction over genocide, aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—crimes of the utmost seriousness often committed by governments themselves, or with their tacit approval. The ICC has the formal authority to adjudge the actions of high state officials as criminal and to send them to jail, no matter how lofty the accused's position or undisputed the legality of those acts under domestic law. While the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) also possess this authority, those institutions operate directly under the control of the United Nations Security Council and within narrow territorial limits. The ICC, by contrast, is largely independent of the Council and vests the power to investigate and prosecute the politically sensitive crimes within its broad territorial sweep in a single individual, its independent prosecutor.

The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.

Democracy and international governance / Susan Marks -- Intergovernmental societies and the idea of constitutionalism / Philip Allott -- Constitutional interpretation in international organizations / Jose E. Alvarez -- The rationality of the use of force and the evolution of international organization / Veijo Heiskanen -- International organizations in a period of globalization: new (problems of) legitimacy / G.C.A. Junne -- The changing image of international organizations / Jan Klabbers -- International democratic culture and its sources of legitimacy: the case of collective security and peacekeeping operations in the 1990s / Jean-Marc Coicaud -- The legitimacy of Security Council activities under Chapter VII of the UN Charter after the end of the Cold War / Tetsuo Sato -- The legitimacy of the World Trade Organization / Robert Howse -- The process towards the new international financial architecture / Marc Uzan -- Distributive justice and the World Bank: the pursuit of gender equity in the context of market reform / Kerry Rittich -- Legitimacy in the real world: a case study of the developing countries, non-government organizations, and climate change / Joyeeta Gupta

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

The surprising thing about international law is that nations ever obey its strictures or carry out its mandates. This observation is made not to register optimism that the half-empty glass is also half full, but to draw attention to a pregnant phenomenon: that most states observe systemic rules much of the time in their relations with other states. That they should do so is much more interesting than, say, the fact that most citizens usually obey their nation's laws, because the international system is organized in a voluntarist fashion, supported by so little coercive authority. This unenforced rule system can obligate states to profess, if not always to manifest, a significant level of day-to-day compliance even, at times, when that is not in their short-term self-interest. The element of paradox attracts our attention and challenges us to investigate it, perhaps in the hope of discovering a theory that can illuminate more generally the occurrence of voluntary normative compliance and even yield a prescription for enhancing aspects of world order.