Acceso usuarios
Suzanne Katzenstein
Why do governments create international courts even though doing so requires a sacrifice of sovereignty? Current scholarship provides only partial insight into this question. It has focused almost exclusively on existing international courts, overlooking the vast number of failed attempts at international judicialization.
This Article offers one of the first systematic and historically-grounded analyses of attempts to create international courts throughout the 20th century, evaluating both successful and failed cases across a diverse set of issue areas. The analysis demonstrates that international legal crises are often of great importance in facilitating international judicialization. Crises unsettle the international legal order.
Eager to restore it, governments become more willing to cooperate with one another and to overcome their prior reluctance about creating an international court. Crises also provide new opportunities for legal networks to advocate for the creation of international courts.
This analysis helps explain why specific international courts came into being while a large number of others that were proposed during the 20th century never saw the light of day. It provides guidance for those seeking to create new international courts. Finally, it sheds light on the efficacy of international courts, a subject of lively debate among international law scholars.
