It may seem rather odd for anyone to be writing a chapter on the subject of the International Court of Justice and the pacific settlement of international disputes, since the pacific settlement of disputes is the function of the Court, like any other court. However, a discussion entitled thus need not be without point; there have been many attempts to assess the contribution of the Court to the settlement of disputes. But this kind of approach suffers from several shortcomings. It can lead to one simply cataloguing the disputes that have come before it, saying whether the Court's judgment or opinion did settle or assist in settling those disputes. Or it may consist also in a consideration of the importance of the disputes in question from the point of view of world peace, or of the development of international law.

Sometimes this kind of enterprise leads to conclusions such as that the Court has settled relatively few disputes, or that the disputes it has been called upon to settle have been on the whole relatively trivial when set against the background of the state of the world. These conclusions are then used to assert that the Court has too little to do and that it should be given more work.