Suchergebnisse

AbstractAre international courts power-seeking by nature, expanding the reach and scope of international rules and the courts' authority where permissive conditions allow? Or, does expansionist lawmaking require special nurturing? We investigate the relative influences of nature versus nurture by comparing expansionist lawmaking in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ), the ECJ's jurisdictional cousin and the third most active international court. We argue that international judges are more likely to become expansionist lawmakers where they are supported by substate interlocutors and compliance constituencies, including government officials, advocacy networks, national judges, and administrative agencies. This comparison of two structurally identical international courts calls into question prevailing explanations of ECJ lawmaking, and it suggests that prevailing scholarship puts too much emphasis on the self-interested power-seeking of judges, the importance of institutional design features, and the preferences of governments to explain lawmaking by international courts.

Was the European Court of Justice a key actor in the "relaunching" of European integration in the 1980s? This article examines the crucial political role that was played by the Court with its Cassis de Dijon judgment in the rejuvenation EC harmonization policy and the development of the Single European Act. The authors challenge the dominant view that the Court's legal decisions in themselves create policy consequences, or that legal verdicts reflect the views of dominant member states, so as to create focal points around which a policy consensus emerges. They argue, instead, that the Cassis verdict acted as a catalyst, provoking a political response by the Commission, which attempted to capitalize on the verdict to create a "new approach to harmonization." This political entrepreneurship by the Commission triggered the mobilization of interest groups that lobbied their national governments for and against mutual recognition. Generalizing from the case, this article concludes that the Court performs three crucial roles in the EC policy-making process: opening political access to self-interested individuals, launching ideas into the policy-making arena, and provoking political responses through bold argumentation and unpopular verdicts.

This Oxford Handbook provides interdisciplinary perspectives on international adjudication, analysing the proliferation of international courts and tribunals from the perspective of both international law and political science. It presents the different theoretical approaches to these courts, their main functions, and the issues confronting them.