Assessing the Effectiveness of International Courts.

Dutton, Yvonne

Assessing the Effectiveness of International Courts. By Yuval Shany Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Whether and to what extent international courts and tribunals are effective is a question that has puzzled and engaged scholars for years. Yuval Shany acknowledges the importance of such research. However, he argues that the traditional proxies for judicial effectiveness" (p. 5)--"caseloads, judgment-compliance records, acceptance of jurisdiction, etc." (p. 308)--may be of limited utility. Indeed, he suggests that high scores on some of these parameters may sometimes be more indicative of "judicial ineffectiveness" (p. 308, emphasis in original). For example, courts that issue weak judgments (low-aiming courts) may generally have high levels of compliance, but may not deeply influence state practice or promote greater norm compliance (p. 135).

In his book, Shany introduces the "goal-based approach" to assessing judicial effectiveness--an approach that proceeds from the premise that effective international courts are courts that attain, within a predefined amount of time, the goals set for them by their relevant constituencies" (p. 6). Shany identifies several "generic" goals, such as dispute resolution and norm support (pp. 38, 40), but notes that each institution also has its own "idiosyncratic" goals (p. 46). For example, some international courts have the stated goal of "promoting peace and security or reconciliation" (p. 46). Employing the goal-based approach requires the researcher to assess the degree to which a given institution attains both generic and idiosyncratic goals by evaluating "judicial outcomes" (p. 52), which Shany defines as the effects of the court's outputs (such as decisions) on the "external state of the world" (p. 53).

Shany puts his theory to the test in five cowritten chapters, each of which is a case study of a different institution: the International Court of Justice (ICJ); the World Trade Organization (WTO); the International Criminal Court; the European Court of Human Rights; and the Court of Justice of the European Union. He concludes from his analysis that the ICJ is relatively ineffective in achieving some of its goals--a conclusion that he attributes to some of the constraints built into the court's institutional design (p. 188). In particular, the court relies on state consent to obtain jurisdiction (pp. 169, 311). By contrast, Shany concludes that the WTO's design feature of exclusive and compulsory jurisdiction aids it in being relatively effective in fulfilling its goals (pp. 197, 310).

Shany's theory is developed thoroughly and his case studies are thick with detail. The book is a welcome contribution to the literature examining the effectiveness of international courts and should provoke additional dialogue on this important issue.