This chapter attempts to articulate a new framework for a modern (contemporary) conception of ICA. It asserts that the current Free Proof rubric is but an ad hoc black-box paradigm of unworkable adjudication. Even though an aprioristic exclusionary evidential approach is discouraged, the point is made that such understanding of evidence is hardly foreign to ICA, and is contained in the IBA Rules. A fine line, so that argument says, must be drawn between preserving the inherent powers of arbitrators and the workings of an objective evidential regime. Hypotheticals are offered in this regard. Lastly, the chapter examines the need to have a workable approach to witness examination. Here the myth that cross-examination has its origins in Anglo-American trial work is substantively challenged by the classical writings of Plato.

Failure to deliver a fair trial within a reasonable time is the most common violation found by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as almost half of all its judgments include a violation of Article 6. If the ECtHR were subject to its own jurisdiction, however, it, too, would be in violation of Article 6 in a sizable portion of its judgments. Therefore, both reports by the Court itself and academic literature have urged the Court to increase digitalisation and employ new technologies, including AI, in its procedures. Historically, the Court has employed an ambivalent approach to new technology, incorporating it in its caseload management, but insisting on the use of fax and physical mail in its communications with applicants. There are indicators, such as allowing electronic applications from Ukraine due to the suspension of physical mail during the war with Russia, that the Court may be abandoning this ambivalence. This chapter accounts for the current and potential use of AI at the ECtHR in each of the steps in its adjudication, evaluating the potential of existing AI technologies and the risks involved, considering the procedures and divisions of labour at the ECtHR.

The Permanent Court of International Justice (1919–1946) may be seen as an unprecedented institutional experiment. Its impact and output have been substantial, and consequently its legacy might equally be called fundamental. This chapter seeks to demonstrate the veracity of the foregoing statements, situating the Court in its contemporary context while building on similar scholarly ventures that were undertaken previously. In contrast to earlier inquiries, the study reflects rather more broadly on the institution’s positioning, especially on how it interacted with the principal organs of the League of Nations. It begins by placing a focus on the Court’s inception, from an idea to fully settled status. Thereafter, the chapter analyses the environment within which the Court functioned, and the interplay with its League interlocutors. Next, a review is undertaken of a series of leading pronouncements, both judgments and advisory opinions, concentrating on those verdicts that have obtained a genuinely enduring value. Drawing from these analyses, an assessment is made of the Court’s overall contribution to the multilateral order against the background of interwar-era politics followed in turn by a brief series of concluding observations.

This chapter begins by elaborating on the concept of a dispute, before providing a historical perspective on the evolution of the requirement to settle disputes peacefully. The chapter then explores diplomatic and legal methods of dispute settlement. Diplomatic forms of dispute settlement (also known as political or non-legal forms of dispute settlement) include negotiation, mediation, inquiry, and conciliation. Legal forms of dispute settlement include arbitration and adjudication. Resort by states to dispute settlement procedures, and in particular legal methods of dispute settlement, has grown exponentially in the last decades. Since the 1990s, the International Court of Justice has had an increasingly active docket of cases; in addition, the Permanent Court of Arbitration has undergone a sort of renaissance. The focus of this chapter is on the settlement of inter-state disputes, as opposed to disputes between states and non-state actors or between non-state actors.

This Chapter, the final chapter, concludes and discusses the future directions of the research on security exceptions. It examines the evolving role of security exceptions in international economic law, particularly within the WTO framework. While traditionally viewed as shields for states to implement necessary security measures, these exceptions increasingly serve as tools for economic protectionism and geopolitical leverage. The Chapter explores the complexities of balancing trade commitments with national security concerns, highlighting inconsistencies in adjudication and the risks of opportunistic state behavior. It proposes a dual framework distinguishing between conventional and novel security measures, advocating for clearer rules, procedural safeguards, and a compensation mechanism to deter abuse. Additionally, it calls for WTO reforms, stronger cooperation with the UN, and revisions to regional trade agreements and investment treaties to ensure security measures remain transparent, time-bound, and economically efficient.

This Chapter proposes a coherent approach to the review of security exceptions under international trade and investment agreements by international adjudicators. The contribution of this Chapter is two-fold. First, it examines whether the clarification of the scope of the existing security exception clauses and their coherent application by international adjudicators under both regimes could help restrain the securitization of states’ trade and investment policies. Secondly, and conversely, it aims to draw some conclusions about the extent to which existing security exception clauses provide sufficient policy space for WTO members to protect their national interests.

Abstract: This chapter considers three key types of international judicial remedies, exploring their content, availability, and behavioural influence. Through Mere Adjudication, an adjudicator establishes the existence, applicability, and content of legal rules. Through a Declaration of Breach, a court declares that a party’s conduct violates legal obligations. Where a violation is found, international courts often establish Consequential Duties, determining how a wrongdoer must act to bring an end to its violation and provide reparation for injury. Overall, international judicial remedies seek to prevent states’ adoption of unilateral remedies, grounded on their own understanding of the law and facts. International courts are unable to determine the application of coercive measures against states. Thus, every remedy is a communication regarding either the interpretation of the law or the application of this law to conduct. Judicial pronouncements have remedial value if they are able to mobilise pro-compliance forces, internal and external to states, by which the international normative framework guides state conduct.

This chapter explains the various mechanisms for the resolution of disputes, chiefly arising out of violations of the rules of the ITF, ATP and WTA. It focuses on ITF mechanisms, starting with internal processes and on-site quasi adjudicatory mechanisms. It then goes on to examine the ITF’s Internal Adjudication Panel, especially its first-instance, appellate and supervisory function, followed by the Independent Tribunal, which is an arbitral body. It proceeds to look at the various types of powers and functions conferred on the Tribunal and the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) arising out of appeals against the Independent Tribunal. The chapter examines briefly the very narrow ATP and WTA dispute resolution mechanisms and the role of national courts in dealing with contractual tennis disputes.

Courts are institutions within the broad body politic of their society, which comprises not only the branches and institutions of the state, but also political parties, the media, civil society and the legal profession. The role that courts play in modern bodies politic has expanded significantly since the Second World War, mainly as a result of the practice of writing constitutions. These constitutions have often been adopted at a time of transitions, such as decolonisation, following a war or a period of autocratic rule or civil war and have accordingly often been accompanied by uncertainty and fragility. Responding to the expanded role of courts with a general normative claim that the expanded role of courts is democratically inappropriate without a careful consideration of the circumstances in which the role of courts has been expanded is unsatisfactory and in a world in which democratic backsliding is largely characterised by an expansion in executive power is probably also unwise.

In this chapter, the authors frame the interwar period as instrumental for the institutionalisation of international dispute settlement, with respect to both the establishment of institutions and the development of new applicable law. The chapter focuses on the institutions, but equally emphasises the foundational principles which govern the field, with the principle of consent at the forefront; with all their characteristic features and limitations, such principles are conspicuous and remain valid today. The chapter gives context to the creation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) and the subsequent establishment and the main features of the Permanent Court; last but not least, it pays homage to the mixed arbitral tribunals, with their impressive machinery and cases decided. The interwar period was undoubtedly a time of experimentation, but it would be naïve to believe that it has come to an end: experiments remain ongoing.

The journey of mediation as a non-authoritative process into the court system has come full circle with one utterly different model emerging in contemporary times. As mentioned in the previous chapters, mediation has inspired hybrid judicial roles and settlement promotion and introduced consent as the foundation for many hybrid legal processes. Yet this hybridization has worked both ways, affecting mediation as well. Authority-based mediation is emerging as an advanced judicial process that generates public norms. This new sophisticated model for dealing with polycentric legal problems while preserving soft qualities of the process and keeping a narrow focus on a legal outcome is, in fact, a novel form of private adjudication. We describe this emergent form of mediation and its theoretical underpinnings.

This chapter introduces Review Bodies as accountability mechanisms for fundamental rights violations by the EU executive. As an umbrella concept, Review Bodies includes all actors except courts that, upon individual petition, independently review potential fundamental rights violations by EU actors. For the EU, these Review Bodies are the European Ombudsman, Boards of Appeal, and Fundamental Rights Officers. Albeit vested with weaker authority than courts, Review Bodies offer two crucial elements for comprehensive access to justice. First, Review Bodies are complementary to courts, meaning that they are often more accessible and more specialized. Second, Review Bodies focus less on individual issues of legality but on structural problems that produce repeated fundamental rights violations. In principle, this would place Review Bodies in a prime position to advance executive accountability in the EU. However, too often, Review Bodies are underfunded and lack the ‘teeth’ to discipline EU executive actors. Therefore, to improve access to justice and remedy structural problems engrained into the Union’s burgeoning executive power, authority and funding of Review Bodies should expand and other actors, especially courts, should team up with Review Bodies to effectuate their structure-focused expertise through the ‘teeth’ of judicial authority and public pressure.

Chapter 8 focuses on the imperial state level to examine the legal and political logic informing the final adjudication of the case in 1799, a decision that constituted a shift in the decisions the Council of the Indies and colonial tribunals had been taking in the 1780s. The chapter examines the political reasons related to mining utility and security that informed the shift and the juridical basis imperial jurists used to ground the case’s outcome. Ultimately, the Bourbon Crown ruled in favor of the cobreros but attached caveats related to Indian law to their collective freedom. The chapter ventures into the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Edict of 1800 to examine the challenges that emerged in the colony regarding the actualization of the decreed emancipation. It also interrogates the possibility of compensation or reparations to the cobreros for their wrongful enslavement.

To litigate or not to litigate, that is the question any Chinese companies operating in the United States long enough must contemplate. For American companies, litigation is nothing but an unavoidable business risk and often a vital competition strategy, routinely dealt with by legal and managerial professionals applying monetarized cost–benefit analysis. Such analysis typically incorporates attorney fees and other litigation expenses, potential reputational damage, time and human resource consumption, and the present value of expected litigation gains or losses. By contrast, litigation in China carries complex social meanings and is often avoided to preserve long-term cooperative relationships or to signal desirable attributes to uninformed third parties. When lawsuits do occur, they are often handled by stakeholders without professional legal assistance. Disputants consider a wide range of material and nonmaterial interests that are shaped by both formal institutions undergoing significant transformation and complex, entrenched social norms governing dispute resolution. Chinese companies immersed in these two disparate institutional environments approach legal disputes in the United States.

The ICJ is the primary court for legal disputes among governments. It hears cases in which one country claims that another country has violated its obligations under international law. This chapter introduces the ICJ by examining its legal foundation in the Statute of the ICJ, and shows its powers and limits in practice by looking at the cases of Belgium v. Congo (on genocide) and Australia v. Japan (on rights and obligations for whale hunting under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling).

On AI-assisted adjudication, concerns including biases (such as automation bias, anchoring bias, contrarian bias, and herd bias) and ethical worries (such as human adjudicators ceasing to be decision-makers, excessive standardisation of decisions, and the fact that judges may be pressured to conform to the AI’s predictions) can be addressed. Adjudicators may use AI to assist them in their decisions in three aspects: training and implementation; actual use; and monitoring. Because AI will not be able to provide the legal justifications underlying its predictions, the human adjudicator will have to explain why the AI-generated prediction is legally justified. AI will not replace adjudicators.

AI will greatly assist in the administration of express and charitable trusts and also be of significant benefit to trust law in acting as an adjudicator. AI should be able to act as an acceptable trustee of an express trust, and resulting trusts do not insurmountably challenge AI, either as trustees or adjudicators. The proposition that discretionary trusts are unsuited to AI administration can be rejected along with the notion that the discretionary nature of remedies makes this area of law unsuited to AI adjudication. Although constructive trusts may pose some difficulties for AI, this may be solved through legal reform. Further, the difficulties that AI trustees will create are not incapable of practical solutions.

Biases in decision-making based on race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and other social identities are pervasive in the criminal justice and legal systems. Likewise, the positionality of legal actors and lay people from diverse groups both influences and constrains legally relevant judgments. This chapter uses a case study of racially biased judgments in the criminal justice and legal systems to illustrate how judgment processes can lead to unequal outcomes across social groups. It then describes ways in which law-psychology can expand research on diversity in legal decision-making, addressing issues related to social class, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and reproductive decision-making by women. It also discusses frameworks and perspectives that provide valuable insights on legal decision-making but which often are overlooked by psycholegal scholars, including intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the abolition movement. The chapter concludes by examining the limits of a decision-making framework for understanding unequal outcomes in legally relevant contexts, which frequently are the result of structural and implicit biases in addition to deliberate judgments.

The author attempts to unravel the close conceptual and practical connection between consent and autonomy. The chapter argues that consent is the vehicle of autonomy, vehicle through which States give themselves their own rules, both primary rules and secondary rules. Because the exercise of autonomy in the international society faces contextual limits, linked to the self (auto) and to the law (nomos), it is claimed, that consent appears not only to be characterized by power, but also by limitations. This holds true for consent in international law-making as much as for consent in international dispute settlement. The chapter focuses on both categories, discussing the theory of sources and institutional law-making with respect to the former and jurisdictional matters and applicable law with respect to the latter. It concludes – prospectively – with some thoughts on the future of autonomy and consent in international legal theory and practice