The increasing number of international judicial institutions, producing an ever-growing stream of decisions, has been one of the dominant features of the international legal order of the past two decades. The shift in quantity has gone hand in hand with a transformation in quality. Today, it is no longer convincing to only think of international courts in their role of settling disputes. While this function is as relevant as ever, many international judicial institutions have developed a further role in what is often called global governance. Their decisions have effects beyond individual disputes. They exceed the confines of concrete cases and bear on the general legal structures. The practice of international adjudication creates and shifts actors' normative expectations and as such develops legal normativity. Many actors use international judicial decisions in similar ways as they do formal sources of international law. To us, this role of international adjudication beyond the individual dispute is beyond dispute.

This paper deals with the role of judicial decisions in international adjudication. It is impossible to fail to notice the abundance of prior cases invoked in decisions of international tribunals and that, in order to find out what the law actually is, reference to previous cases is all but inevitable in practice. In some areas of international law, judicial or arbitral decisions have even been said to be the centre of progressive development. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable and deeply-rooted professional trepidation in many parts of the world regarding this enduring phenomenon. Even absent a fully articulated theory of adjudication or legal reasoning, the very idea of “judicial lawmaking” tends to arouse instinctive suspicion, especially when coupled with a denial of any restraining force of prior cases. Be that as it may, observations to the extent that judicial decisions are not veritable sources of international law or only binding between the parties in a particular dispute are only the beginning, and far from the end, of the present inquiry. Several interrelated and intricate questions need to be disentangled and dealt with in order to get a better grasp on what is commonly, and often rather unhelpfully, lumped together loosely under the vague label of “judicial precedent.” The paper is hence partly descriptive and partly revisionary. I do not however intend to rehash general criticisms or defences of precedent. Instead, I aim to present precedent as a general and omnipresent jurisprudential concept that enables and constrains judicial decision-making even in seemingly ordinary cases and to then showcase the specificities of one particular legal system in this respect, namely public international law. Hopefully this provides some of the methodological groundwork for other questions central to the present project, not least concerning the legitimacy of judicial lawmaking.

International courts and tribunals are firstly and particularly conceived to settle legal disputes between States and/or other organs or individuals admitted as parties according to the statute of the respective court by means of a binding decision. An advisory function is not inherent in the function of a judicial body, but has to be transferred expressly upon a court or tribunal in the constituent instrument. For non-standing judicial bodies, i.e., arbitral tribunals, an advisory function is rather unusual, but not altogether ruled out: The parties to a compromis may empower the tribunal to give an advisory opinion.

There appears to be a widespread perception, particularly among developing states, that international institutions continue to be disproportionately influenced by a small group of powerful states that played a dominant role in their creation and design. In recent years this has led to a growing acceptance among international legal scholars that the future legitimacy and credibility of international tribunals will be critically tied to the extent to which they are viewed as independent.

Since the late 1990s investment treaty arbitration has developed into one of the most vibrant fields of international dispute settlement with now almost 400 known cases. It involves claims by foreign investors against host States for breach of obligations assumed under one of the more than 2700 bilateral investment treaties (BITs), under the numerous investment chapters in bilateral or regional free trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, or under sectoral treaties such as the Energy Charter Treaty. All of these instruments offer comprehensive protection to foreign investors by setting down principles of substantive investment protection, including national and most-favored-nation treatment, fair and equitable treatment, full protection and security, protection against expropriation without compensation, and free capital transfer. They also allow investors to enforce these standards in arbitral proceedings directly against the host State, most commonly under the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention). Investment treaty arbitration thereby not only empowers foreign investors under international law, but also introduces investment treaty tribunals as novel actors into the arena of international investment law. Although arbitration has been a classic form of dispute settlement on the State-to-State level, including for the settlement of investment-related disputes, modern investment treaty tribunals have wider jurisdiction and are more removed from State control than any of their predecessors.

Judicial lawmaking in the GATT/WTO context has for some time drawn considerable attention. Some are inclined to show a sense of existentialist anxiety in view of the fact that legal practice does not neatly live up to the orthodox doctrinal order of things. Others see judicial lawmaking as (theoretically or practically) inevitable and tend to readily embrace it as a way of overcoming defunct political processes. Whatever its normative appraisal, as a matter of fact adjudicatory practice has developed some of trade law's cardinal norms. The rise and increasing sophistication of adjudication in the GATT/WTO context has also gone hand in hand with a surge of authority on the part of adjudicators and a larger overall detachment of the law from politico-legislative politics.

In the framework of this project, both the WTO dispute settlement system and international investment tribunals are portrayed as core actors in judicial lawmaking. By weaving international trade law and investment law on the roughly timbered looms of imperfect treaty law, they have proven to be successful creators of the fabrics of a world trade order and of investment protection standards, respectively. Such effective lawmaking, on the part of particular “regimes,” has the potential to increase the fragmentation of international law. Consequently, international judicial institutions are not only spotted as originators of fragmentation, but—as interpreters of international law—also as addressees of strategies in response presented in the 2006 Report of the ILC Study Group on Fragmentation. It is the Study Group's comforting message that a considerable part of the difficulties arising from the diversification and expansion of international law can be overcome by recourse to a “coherent legal-professional technique.” The Fragmentation Report highlights that conflict resolution and interpretation cannot be distinguished: “[w]hether there is a conflict and what can be done with prima facie conflicts depends on the way the relevant rules are interpreted.” According to the Report, coherence can be established by interpreting legal norms with due regard to their normative environment.

Lawmaking by judicial institutions requires legitimation. As international courts gradually play an ever more significant part in the shaping of international law, they share with any other lawmaker the need for a convincing basis of legitimacy. In the case of international courts, however, this need has to be addressed by taking into account their special function: that is, to review decisions made by other lawmakers (mainly domestic). The question of the legitimacy of judicial institutions is thus crucially connected with the standard they apply in reviewing such decisions.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has proven a particularly active defender of human rights in Latin America. The Court has developed an innovative and creative jurisprudence with respect to all kinds of human rights violations, including forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, violations of indigenous peoples' rights or those of undocumented migrants. Legal scholars have praised the Inter-American Court for its effective protection of human rights and even the International Court of Justice has drawn on the judgments of the Inter-American Court. The Inter-American Court has, however, also been criticized for adopting an overly broad standard of review, exceeding the competences conferred on it in the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR, Convention) and for its detailed reparation orders which encroached on the states' internal domestic affairs. Put differently, the Court was blamed for being a too active judicial lawmaker. It has therefore been suggested that the Inter-American Court would be well advised to pay more attention to national sovereignty and the consent of the regional community of states when exercising its adjudicative function.

The institutional design of the Strasbourg system that has evolved over the last decades is an expression of contemporary debates surrounding the system's very nature and purpose. The current debate primarily bears on the range of choices that the Council of Europe faces in adapting to the changes in Europe, which largely have been caused by its expansion to cover nearly all post-Communist States of Central and Eastern Europe since the 1990s. This expansion, and with it the extension of the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) to now more than 800 million people in forty seven countries, has confronted the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) with a far broader range of human rights problems than had previously existed. By 2010, the number of pending cases had risen to 139,650 but the Court's adjudicative capacity remains limited.

Without presenting a full definition, it can be said that the notion of judicial lawmaking implies the idea that courts create normative expectations beyond the individual case. That is, our question is whether courts' normative declarations have an effect which is abstract and general. Our purpose here is to ask about judicial lawmaking in this sense with respect to international criminal courts and tribunals. In particular, we will focus on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). No other international criminal court or tribunal has issued so many judgments as the ICTY, so it seems a particularly useful focus for examining the creation of normative expectations.

In international law, jurisdiction serves the same principal aim as in national law, namely the settlement of disputes in order to maintain (legal) peace and security. In international law, as in national law, judicial procedures take time, sometimes a lot of time, during which the rights at stake may be negatively affected by acts of one of the parties potentially resulting in an ineffective judgment. A remedy against such an occurrence has been developed through an instrument of interim protection by which the court directs the parties to leave the rights as they stand and not to interfere with the situation. Such an instrument appears indispensable in order to ensure that a court or tribunal is able to effectively exercise its function. At the national level, interim protection is usually unproblematic since the competence of the tribunals is mostly comprehensive. In international law, in contrast, the competence of judicial organs is one of the most discussed problems because it depends on the consent of states. Any expansion of competence without an explicit agreement of the states concerned is therefore of utmost significance for the role and the acceptance of international courts and reflects the organizational status of international society. Thus, in the context of the project “Beyond Dispute: Lawmaking by International Judicial Institutions,” the subject-matter of this contribution mostly relates to the role and self-understanding of international judicial organs; it is less concerned with the creation of substantive normative expectations between international subjects. Yet, the expansion of judicial competences fits into the conceptual apparatus of this research as it innovates the legal order and reaches beyond the case at hand. The case of provisional measures provides a particularly fine example of incremental judicial law making through progressive interpretation, supported by a holistic vision of the international judiciary, reciprocal strengthening and later state practice, as well as its functional legitimation and its limits.

The process of norm evolution and development in international law has been highly debated in recent international law and international relations scholarship. However, the debate focuses primarily on states or non-state actors as the agents responsible for shaping international law. In contrast, the role of the judiciary is often neglected in the debate. It is an open secret, though, that courts are not merely Montesquieu's bouche de la loi, impartial arbiters, who apply and interpret exogenous norms. Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke have already pointed out that decisions for concrete cases can hardly be derived from abstract legal concepts by the mere exercise of logical deduction. Instead, the application of legal provisions often involves the development of the applied norm itself. This not only applies in the domestic setting, but is also valid in the international arena. This contribution will deal specifically with lawmaking by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

“Sports law is not just international; it is nongovernmental as well, and this differentiates it from all other forms of law.” Sports rules are genuine “global law” because they are applied across the entire world, they involve both international and domestic levels, and they directly affect individuals: This happens, for instance, in the case of the Olympic Charter, a private act of a “constitutional nature” with which all States comply, or in the case of the World Anti-Doping Code, a document that provides the framework for the harmonization of anti-doping policies, rules, and regulations within sports organizations and among public authorities.

While the introductory contribution addressed the questions and definitions of our research into judicial lawmaking, this concluding chapter discusses strategies regarding the justification of international judicial lawmaking that our introduction sought to capture and that the volume set out to present. How can one square such lawmaking with the principle of democracy? A first response could be to negate the phenomenon. If there were no such thing as judicial lawmaking, there would evidently be no need for its justification. This response, though unconvincing, merits attention all the same because, according to the traditional and still widespread view of international dispute settlement, international decisions flow from the consent of the state parties to the dispute, both from the consensual basis of the applicable law and from consent-based jurisdiction. If state parties are democratic, then the presence of their consent should solve any legitimate question as long as the courts only fulfill their task of dispute settlement properly. This explains the emphasis that traditional schools of thought place on the cognitive paradigm and on the principle that judges are limited to applying the law to the dispute at hand.