Journal of Political Philosophy 2020. States are free, yet everywhere live under international courts and tribunals (ICs). As they proliferate and gain power across ever more domains, ICs become targets of resistance and criticism that they are illegitimate authorities. What reasons might a state have to defer to an IC’s judgment or interpretation, even when the state regards it as mistaken, and even when it conflicts with the interests and objectives of government? Section I sketches the multiple tasks of ICs, in complex interdependence with other actors. Their core task is to adjudicate disputes through interpretation and application of international law by legal methods. This may also contribute indirectly to a range of further tasks. Section II addresses some aspects of the relation between normative legitimacy of ICs and descriptive legitimacy – actors’ beliefs therein. Section III shows how a wide range of legitimacy challenges concern ways ICs fail to carry out their tasks. This account does not seek to provide substantive arguments or seek to show that all such criticisms are correct. The aims are rather to make many such criticisms comprehensible as legitimacy concerns, to provide a rationale for popular taxonomies of legitimacy criticisms, and to indicate which premises and arguments are required for such criticisms to be sound.[D0I/LINK] [SSRN]

in Legitimacy: The State and Beyond, ed. W. Sadurski, M. Sevel & K. Walton. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2019: 223-237. Many claims that international courts (ICs) are illegitimate are related in complex ways – differently in fields ranging from human rights to trade. This is not to deny that some talk of the illegitimacy of ICs is inaccurate or wrong. But it is possible and indeed valuable to develop a coherent account that connects several various usages, so as to specify better, worse and downright mistaken claims concerning the legitimacy of ICs. normative legitimacy provides helpful unity to many of the canvassed forms of legitimacy. The particular substantive normative conception of global justice to be respected and promoted by these institutions is not central to this task. I develop the outline of a theory by drawing on Joseph Raz’ ‘service conception’ of normatively legitimate authority, David Easton’s ‘systems analysis,’ and a cosmopolitan normative theory. Section 1 sketches relevant aspects of Raz’ account of legitimate authority: the service conception. Section 2 lays out some normative standards relevant for the ICs. The next sections then elaborate why, on the service conception, various legitimacy conceptions matter for normative legitimacy: why legality matters (section 3) including some reasons for the (limited) significance of state consent – even by rogue states. Section 4 starts to explore why and when actual compliance is important but not always decisive. Section 5 considers why the performance or effects of an IC matters. [WEB].

“A Better Signpost, Not a Better Walking Stick: How to Evaluate the European Consensus Doctrine”. Building Consensus on European Consensus: Judicial Interpretation of Human Rights in Europe and Beyond. P. Kapotas &V. Tzevelokos. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 189-209. [D0I/LINK] [WEB].