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Abstract
Over the last decade, scholars have debated whether the shifting landscape of individual rights protection in Europe has influenced the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). In our article, 'Walking Back Human Rights in Europe?', we analysed every minority opinion of the ECtHR Grand Chamber between 1998 and 2018. We found a substantial increase in what we labelled as 'walking back dissents' – minority opinions asserting that the Grand Chamber has overturned prior case law or settled doctrine in a way that favours the government. In their Reply, Stone Sweet, Sandholtz and Andenas (SSA) offer two principal critiques. First, they assert that they could not 'replicate' our coding. Second, SSA challenge our claim that legal and political developments in Europe have incentivized the ECtHR to move in a rights-restrictive direction. These claims are inaccurate and mischaracterize our article. First, SSA do not 'replicate' our study. Instead, they code a very small subset of judgments using more restrictive, subjective and vague criteria – which, unsurprisingly, yield fewer walking back dissents. Second, SSA narrowly focus on the Brighton and Copenhagen conferences, ignoring numerous other changes at the national and regional level that have created a more constrained environment for the ECtHR.

Abstract
Judges and scholars have long debated whether the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR or the Court) can only expand, never diminish, human rights protections in Europe. Recent studies have found that political backlashes and national-level restrictions have influenced ECtHR case law. However, analysing whether the ECtHR is shifting in a regressive direction faces an empirical challenge: How can we observe whether the Court is limiting rights over time if it has never expressly overturned a prior judgment in a way that favours the government? We gain traction on this question by analysing all separate and minority opinions of the ECtHR Grand Chamber between 1998 and 2018. We focus on opinions asserting that the Grand Chamber has tacitly overturned prior rulings or settled doctrine in a way that favours the respondent state, which we label as 'walking back dissents'. We find that walking back dissents have become significantly more common in the last decade, revealing that some members of the ECtHR themselves believe that the Grand Chamber is increasingly overturning prior judgments in a regressive direction.

AbstractThis introduction provides an overview of thirteen essays selected in response to a worldwide call for papers for an Agora on "The International Legal Order and the Global Pandemic." The essays in the Agora consider some of the most pressing challenges, as well as potential opportunities, that COVID-19 is creating for the international legal order. The specific topics addressed include the role of international organizations such as the World Health Organization, state responsibility, human rights, financial regulation, and international trade. Contributors were invited to address the theme from a historical, institutional, doctrinal, normative, critical, or geopolitical perspective, or a mix of perspectives.

Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? We develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. We examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new data set that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. We also collect data on LGBT policies unaffected by ECtHR judgments to control for the confounding effect of evolving trends in national policies. We find that ECtHR judgments against one country substantially increase the probability of national-level policy change across Europe. The marginal effects of the judgments are especially high where public acceptance of sexual minorities is low, but where national courts can rely on ECtHR precedents to invalidate domestic laws or where the government in power is not ideologically opposed to LGBT equality. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for other international courts. Adapted from the source document.