The call for ethical leadership in international organizations is intuitively persuasive. We need – or at least, we want – leaders to ‘model’ ethical values: to profess them and, ideally, to be guided by them. This is not simply an issue of public perception about international organizations. In numerous conversations over many years with individuals who worked professionally in the vast system of organizations that comprise ‘international Geneva’ – including senior civil servants in the United Nations (UN) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) systems, civil society activists, members of diplomatic delegations and young interns to all of these positions – I found that many were emphatic that good leaders made an enormous difference. This may be particularly important for the staff of international organizations: many of them come to these organizations with a deep sense of idealism and a desire to ‘make the world a better place’ and they believe that such leaders need to set an example.

The Greek Pavilion in the 57 Venice Biennale of Art, hosted an exhibition titled Laboratory of Dilemmas. As the informative note explained at the entrance of the site: ‘Laboratory of dilemmas is a narrative video installation based on Aeschylus’ theatre play Iketides (Suppliant women) and the dilemmas it poses between saving the Foreigner or maintaining the safety of the Native, which attempts to expose the anguish, puzzlement and confusion of individuals and social groups when called upon to address similar dilemmas’. According to the note: Iketides ‘is the first literary text in history that raises the issue of a persecuted group of people seeking asylum …. . The King is faced with a major dilemma … If he doesn’t help them he will be breaking the sacred laws of hospitality and violating the principles of Law and Humanism, leaving the Suppliants to the mercy of their pursuers who might well destroy them.’

In the burgeoning realm of global governance, ethics has occupied an increasingly prominent place in recent years. One of the buzzwords of the last two decades or so has been ‘accountability’, a term which carries overtones of proper behaviour, control and responsibility. Persons in a position of leadership emphasize their concern for such things as full financial disclosure and transparency. The humanitarian intervention over Kosovo may have been illegal but was nonetheless, many have claimed, ethically justifiable. Codes of ethics have been devised both for the international bar and, somewhat lukewarm, for the international judiciary. The infamous ‘torture memos’ have thrown into perspective the need for legal advisors to behave ethically; writings have appeared on the ethical aspects of humanitarian missions, and several studies have been published focusing on the ethics of the international legal order as such, the ethics of international commercial arbitration, or the ethics of the international bar.

Two central transformations occurred in the second decade of twenty-first century. The first is a whole new level of access to information about peoples’ habits. This is the ‘big data’ revolution: never before had it been possible to gather so much information about so many people, with such accuracy – specially gathered by huge online service providers such as Facebook, Google or Amazon, which record each of the action of their users. Thus, while marketing strategists or political campaigns have always sought to know the preferences of particular segments of the population, big data makes possible a truly high-resolution profiling of behaviours, which reflects the habits of specific individuals, and not only of demographic groups or certain geographical areas.

The most compelling one would probably be to keep in mind that international sporting institutions are formally private institutions. There is one important exception, however, that is the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an interesting case of global hybrid public and private body, which adopts the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC). Beside WADA, international sporting bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and the decades of International Sports Federations are genuinely private entities and, in most cases, it is Swiss civil law that regulates them.

Can a doctrinal scholarship which is based on the normativist-positivist framework espoused in this book do any better than mainstream legal scholarship? Starting from a critique of certain hyper-systematising approaches, the chapter introduces Kelsen’s idea of legal scholarship properly so called, one devoid of external influences because these make it impossible to correctly cognise the law. Reconstructed in this manner, doctrinal scholarship can provide a structural analysis of the law, both on the macro-level of system-coherence and on the micro-level as frame-determination. It can also give practical information on how awards have exercised their freedom within the frame of possible meanings.