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The situated and bounded rationality of international courts: A structuralist approach to international adjudicative practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2022

Salvatore Caserta  and
Mikael Rask Madsen
Salvatore Caserta
Affiliation:
The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 16, 2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark Email: salvatore.caserta@jur.ku.dk
Mikael Rask Madsen
Affiliation:
The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 16, 2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark Email: Mikael.Madsen@jur.ku.dk
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Abstract

Understanding international judicial behaviour requires the development of a perspective that considers both individual and collective action. On the one hand, individual judges are influenced and shaped by their background and trajectory prior to their international judicial appointment; on the other hand, when appointed to international courts, they become part of a particular social setting and group dynamic. The article provides an interpretive, structural theory of judicial behaviour which allows for an understanding of international judicial action and the judicial institutional practices resulting from it. The article explains this double structuration of international judicial behaviour by first reconsidering and amending the notion of habitus, originally developed by Pierre Bourdieu, and secondly by applying this idea to the practice of the Caribbean Court of Justice.

Type
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 931 - 943
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law in association with the Grotius Centre for International Law, Leiden University

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Footnotes

*

This research is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation Grant no. DNRF105 and conducted under the auspices of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts).

References

1 R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (1977).

2 Early sociologists of law, such as Eugen Ehrlich, have questioned key assumptions of legal formalism, including the coherence of the law, for instance. See E. Ehrlich, Grundlegung der Sociologie des Rechts (1913).

3 A. Ross, Om Ret og Retfærdighed. En Indførelse i den Analytiske Retsfilosofi (1966); J. Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (1963); J. Frank, Courts on Trial: Myth and Reality in American Justice (1973); K. N. Llewellyn, Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice (2011).

4 On ENLR see J. v. H. Holtermann and M. R. Madsen, ‘European New Legal Realism and International Law: How to Make International Law Intelligible’, (2015) 28 Leiden Journal of International Law 211. When referring to structuralist sociology, we think of Pierre Bourdieu, and not Anthony Giddens. The latter employs the term structuration and conducts an analysis that shares traits with Pierre Bourdieu. However, Bourdieu’s approach is more geared towards empirical investigation than that of Giddens.

5 L. J. D. Wacquant, ‘Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu’, (1989) 7 Sociological Theory 26.

6 K. J. Alter, L. Helfer and M. R. Madsen (eds.), International Court Authority (2018).

7 C. L. de Secondat Montesquieu, De L’Ésprit des Lois (1748).

8 This idea was further conceptualized by Max Weber through the notion of legal rationality which, although centred on the emergence of the bureaucratic state, provided the intellectual framework for the development of Hans Kelsen’s notion of pure law which is the ultimate legal-scientific articulation of a law-centred explanation of law. See H. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre (1934); M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der Verstehenden Soziologie (1980).

9 Whether legal realism is and should be empirical is contested. See G. C. Shaffer, ‘The New Legal Realist Approach to International Law’, (2015) 28 Leiden Journal of International Law 2, 189; G. C. Shaffer and T. Ginsburg, ‘The Empirical Turn in International Legal Scholarship’, (2012) 106 American Journal of International Law 1, at 1. J. v. H. Holtermann and M. R. Madsen, ‘What is Empirical in Empirical Studies of Law? A European New Legal Realist Conception’, (2016) 39 Retfærd – Nordic Journal of Law and Justice 3; Holtermann and Madsen, supra note 4.

10 Frank, supra note 3.

11 Other scholars of judicial behaviour and politics could similarly be mentioned here. Our approach, which emphasizes the mode of production of institutional judicial practices, has commonalities with institutionalist scholarship on judicial behaviour. See C. W. Clayton and H. Gillman, Supreme Court Decision-Making: New Institutionalist Approaches (1999)

12 A. Ross, On Law and Justice (1958), at 37.

13 Ibid., at 75.

14 These and other questions have been raised in a growing body of literature on judicial behaviour, which we cannot address here. In the context of international adjudication see, for example, S. Dothan, ‘The Motivations of Individual Judges and How They Act as a Group’, (2018) 19 German Law Journal 2165.

15 M. Weber, Critique of Stammler (1977), at 130.

16 H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (1994), at 91.

17 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (1996), at 66.

18 See discussion in J. v. H. Holtermann and M. R. Madsen, ‘High Stakes and Persistent Challenges – A Rejoinder to Klabbers and Augsberg’, (2015) 28 Leiden Journal of International Law 487.

19 A. Ross and H. P. Olsen, ‘The 25th Anniversary of the Pure Theory of Law’, (2011) 31 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 243, at 314.

20 P. Bourdieu, ‘The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field,’ (1986) 38 Hastings Law Journal 805, at 814.

21 Ross and Olsen, supra note 19, at 314.

22 Bourdieu, supra note 20, at 816–17.

23 S. Caserta and M. R. Madsen, ‘Between Community Law and Common Law: The Rise of the Caribbean Court of Justice at the Intersection of Regional Integration and Post-Colonial Legacies’, (2016) 79 Law and Contemporary Problems 89.

24 M. R. Madsen, ‘The Narrowing of the European Court of Human Rights? Legal Diplomacy, Situational Self-Restraint and the New Vision of the Court’, (2021) 2(2) The European Convention on Human Rights Law Review 180; M. R. Madsen, ‘Legal Diplomacy – Law, Politics and the Genesis of Postwar European Human Rights’, in S. n L. Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: A Critical History (2011).

25 N. Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (1993).

26 As already pointed out by ENLR scholars. See Holtermann and Madsen, supra note 4.

27 Bourdieu, supra note 20, at 811.

28 P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977); P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (1990).

29 As Bourdieu notes: ‘The individual is always, whether he likes it or not, trapped … within the limits of the system of categories he owes to his upbringing and training.’ P. Bourdieu and L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992), at 126.

30 Bourdieu, supra note 28.

31 D. Terris, C. P. R. Romano and L. Swigart, The International Judge: An Introduction to the Men and Women Who Decide the World’s Cases (2007).

32 A. M. Slaughter, ‘A Global Community of Courts’, (2003) 44 Harvard International Law Review 191.

33 O. Schachter, ‘The Invisible College of International Lawyers’, (1977) 72 Northwestern University Law Review 217.

34 A. Roberts, Is International Law International? (2017).

35 S. Caserta and M. R. Madsen, ‘Hybridity in International Adjudication: How International are International Commercial Courts?’, in S. Brekoulakis and G. Dimitropoulos (eds.), International Commercial Courts – and the Future of International Adjudication (2022).

36 M. R. Madsen, ‘The International Judiciary as Transnational Power Elite’, (2014) 8 International Political Sociology 332. See also E. Bleich et al., ‘Diplomats in Robes: Judicial Career Paths and Free Speech Decision-Making at the European Court of Human Rights’, (2021) Law & Social Inquiry 1; F. Bruinsma, ‘Judicial Identities in the European Court of Human Rights’, in A. Van Hoek et al. (eds.), Multilevel Governance in Enforcement and Adjudication (2006).

37 See, among others, Shai Dothan and Gregor Maucec in this issue, at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156522000103.

38 M. R. Madsen, ‘The Legitimization Strategies of International Courts: The Case of the European Court of Human Rights’, in M. Bobek (ed.), Selecting Europe’s Judges (2015).

39 E. Yildiz, ‘A Court with Many Faces: Judicial Characters and Modes of Norm Development in the European Court of Human Rights’, (2020) 31 European Journal of International Law 73.

40 E. Voeten, ‘The Impartiality of International Judges: Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights’, (2008) 102 American Political Science Review 417.

41 For an overview of this literature see ibid., at 422.

42 As suggested by the ‘Attitudinal Model’, judges’ preferences matter when stimulated by the type of cases. See J. A. Segal and H. J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited (2002).

43 As explored in K. J. Alter, L. Helfer and M. R. Madsen, ‘How Context Shapes the Authority of International Courts’, in K. J. Alter, L. Helfer and M. R. Madsen (eds.), International Court Authority (2018).

44 See Madsen, supra note 36.

45 See Bourdieu and Wacquant, supra note 29, at 97.

46 Scholars studying the professional traits of judges employ different categories. The three categories of capitals suggested are derived from a mapping of all international judges since the establishment of the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1922. See Madsen, supra note 38.

47 Y. Dezalay and M. R. Madsen, ‘The Force of Law and Lawyers: Pierre Bourdieu and the Reflexive Sociology of Law’, (2012) 8 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 433.

48 As explored in J. L. Slosser and M. R. Madsen, ‘Institutionally Embodied Law: Cognitive Linguistics and the Making of International Law’, in A. Bianchi and M. Hirsch (eds.), International Law’s Invisible Frames: Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes (2021).

49 Caserta and Madsen, supra note 23.

50 Myrie v. Barbados, [2013] CCJ 1 (OJ); Myrie v. Barbados, [2013] CCJ 3 (OJ).

51 D. E. Pollard, The Caribbean Court of Justice – Closing the Circle of Independence (2004).

52 R. M. Belle Antoine, ‘Assessing 10 Years of the Caribbean Court of Justice in its Appellate Jurisdiction: Encouraging Signs of a Mature, Relevant Jurisprudence’, (2016) 3 Caribbean Journal of International Relations & Diplomacy 69.

53 D. O’Brien and S. Foadi, ‘CARICOM and its Court of Justice’, (2008) 37 Common Law World Review 334.

54 Myrie, supra note 50.

55 On the case see W. Anderson, ‘Free Movement within CARICOM- Deconstructing the Myrie vs Barbados’, OECS Bar Association Meeting, available at ccj.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Remarks-by-the-Honourable-Mr-Justice-Winston-Anderson-at-the-OECS-Bar-Association-Meeting_20131207.pdf.

56 Established by the Court of Justice of the European Union in two landmark cases: Case 26/62 Van Gend en Loos [1963] ECR 1 and Case 6/64 Costa [1964] ECR 585.

57 But see A. v. Bogdandy and M. Smrkolj, ‘Reverse Solange–Protecting the Essence of Fundamental Rights against EU Member States’, (2012) 49 Common Market Law Review 2; M. R. Madsen, H. P. Olsen and U. Šadl, ‘Competing Supremacies and Clashing Institutional Rationalities: the Danish Supreme Court’s Decision in the Ajos Case and the National Limits of Judicial Cooperation’, (2017) 23 European Law Journal 140.

58 D. M. Aaron, ‘Reconsidering Dualism: The Caribbean Court of Justice and the Growing Influence of Unincorporated Treaties in Domestic Law’, (2007) 6 The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals 233.

59 D. Berry, Caribbean Integration Law (2014).

60 While presidents of ICs are often selected from among the judges on the bench following a rotation logic, the President of the CCJ is a more influential figure. The President is the only judge on the CCJ whose appointment is political, and is nominated separately from the other judges pursuant to a unanimous vote by the CARICOM Heads of State. The President of the CCJ is appointed following this important consideration, and holds the position for the entire duration of their term, with the result that they may exercise a particularly strong influence on the direction the Court takes.

61 The CVs of the judges are publicly available on the Court’s website at ccj.org/about-the-ccj/judges/.

62 Caserta and Madsen, supra note 23.