The International Court of Justice (ICJ), often referred to as the "World Court," plays a central role in the field of international law. Despite the significance of this court, socio-legal scholarship has not examined the ICJ's inner workings due to limited access. Drawing from field theory and organizational theory, this study addresses this gap by using various data sources including interviews, organizational documents, and publicly available texts from insiders. Based on this data, this article explores how the ICJ's institutional context shapes its organization and the experiences of its actors. We argue that the ICJ provides a space that tightly connects institutional myths, organizational practices, and individual action. This tight coupling effectively mediates and manages differences among ICJ actors, fostering a stable practice of international law within a field otherwise marked by conflict. This enables the ICJ to produce and sustain a specific way of doing international law which has stabilizing effects in this field. By linking the macro level of the field - an area emphasized in prior scholarship - with a microlevel organizational perspective, this article offers a nuanced understanding of the conflicts and organizational practices influencing the ICJ's operations and development of international law.

This article examines how social capital affects the resolution of disputes by focusing on English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, sometimes described as "Wikipedia's Supreme Court." Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the article contends that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially considers the position of each disputant within the community of editors in its decision-making process. In doing so, the Arbitration Committee does not simply decide or arbitrate disputes but seeks to attenuate their impact on Wikipedia's social fabric. This data allows us to revisit sociological debates on the role of social capital, by revealing the ways in which well-connected individuals employ it strategically in order to obfuscate their noncompliance with norms, thus leading to what I call "dispute cancellation."

Drawing on the examples of the ICC and ICSID, this chapter shows how international arbitration has successively embraced a ‘relation-based’ and then a ‘rule-based’ model of governance. Initially, the systems of dispute resolution promoted by the ICC and ICSID displayed the features of the relation-based model. The ICC and ICSID sought to promote self-governance by pooling information concerning traders. A related goal was to encourage repeat business by creating an equitable method of dispute settlement that relied, to a large extent, on the participation of its users. The second step came, however, when self-governance failed to sustain cooperation, leading both the ICC and ICSID to promote a rule-based model of governance where third party-arbitrators and arbitral institutions gained increasing powers over the disputing parties. As a final step, arbitral tribunals evolved towards a fully judicialised system of dispute resolution, causing them to increasingly resemble national courts.

Delphine Rauch, Les prud’homies de pêche en Méditerranée française à l’époque contemporaine. Entre justice professionnelle, communauté de métier et préservation du milieu maritime, Nice, Serre, 2018, 534 p. - Volume 78 Issue 2

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The growing judicialization of ISDS through the use of precedent may be contributing to improved consistency in the interpretation of the FET standard. The FET standard and its interpretation by arbitral tribunals has been blamed for giving foreign investors carte blanche to sanction governments over broad swathes of policy. It is said to be lacking any common definition and that it is a vague and ambiguous catch-all term. This chapter provides a rigorous qualitative and quantitative empirical assessment of the use of citations and their role in the development of the FET standard consistently by tribunals across time. Based on the in-depth exploration of FET case law the authors find that three landmark cases have a de facto stare decisis with the effect of reconciling competing interpretations and ultimately providing a relatively consistent standard.

This article challenges the dominant socio-legal focus on the nation-state by placing emphasis on its margins. Based on a review of the vibrant scholarship in the socio-legal literature, the article sketches the features of social facts that can be found in the interstices of national legal systems and professions. Though these facts are marginalized from the perspective of these systems and professions, their role is no less real in the global arena, in whose centres they are situated. The study of these facts raises methodological questions that this article seeks to address. By attempting to shift the research focus from one object to another, in particular, the article casts light on methodological debates concerning the need to define research categories on a preliminary basis.

The major aim of this article is to examine how migrations affect private governance, taking as a case study the Prud'homie de pêche , a private order that has governed the fishery of Marseille for the past six centuries. Scholarship generally argues that social norms guarantee the efficiency of private orders and their ability to resist the arrival of newcomers. My data suggest that the Prud'homie has failed to accommodate social changes prompted by migratory flows, not despite but because of its social norms. This paper suggests that social norms are not only powerful tools of governance for private orders, but also forces of inertia that can prevent these orders from accommodating social changes.

Abstract This chapter suggests how transnational legal theory provides a relevant analytical frame to capture the norms, actors and processes of international arbitration. The chapter first examines the long-standing academic debates over lex mercatoria before turning to the dominant sociolegal analysis of international arbitration. Both examples illustrate the extent to which the analytical frames furnished by legal scholars are grounded in representations that ought to be transcended for a better understanding of the global world. The notion of transnational law provides a useful analytical frame to reconsider these debates under a new light and to open new avenues for future research.

Abstract This chapter highlights a field that has raised significant interest in recent years: the sociology of individuals who are routinely appointed as international arbitrators to settle the important business disputes that commonly arise in transnational settings. These individuals serve as the private judges of global business law, and their governance functions have grown together with the growth of international arbitration, which is now the preferred method for resolving these disputes. The private nature of these appointments and the creation of a closed group of elite arbitrators have raised important concerns within civil society. The chapter then shows how the elites of international commercial arbitration (ICA) have successfully gained a strong and growing foothold in the burgeoning field of investor–state arbitration (ISA), despite the structural differences between ICA and ISA. Indeed, the elites of ISA and ICA significantly overlap, and have developed similar social strategies to secure legitimacy within the unified field of international arbitration.

This chapter aims at highlighting the relevance of Jessup’s analysis based on the example of international arbitration. In this chapter, I will use the example of international arbitration to contextualize the notion of transnational law and its potential relevance as an analytical tool. I will do so by intertwining two analyses. I will consider, on the one hand, the ways in which international arbitration was a source of inspiration for Jessup when elaborating the notion of transnational law. On the other hand, I will consider how the notion of transnational law constitutes a relevant tool for the analysis of international arbitration and its subsequent developments. Jessup,who was not only an academic but also, first and foremost, a practitioner of international relations, demonstrated the necessity of establishing such a dialogue between theory and practice.

This paper offers a socio‐historical study of the Prud'homie de peche (the “Prud'homie”), a common‐pool institution (“CPI”) that has managed the fishery commons at Marseille since the Middle Ages. The evidence presented here sheds light on specific challenges faced by the Prud'homie during the early stages of globalization: one challenge is the import of a new fishing technique (the madrague) in the early 17th century, and another challenge is the arrival of migrant fishermen from Catalonia throughout the 18th century. On this basis, this paper explores the ways in which globalization has impacted the Prud'homie and identifies the mechanisms through which these challenges might threaten the functioning of CPIs.

The bulk of the literature on transnational governance focuses on the bottom-up emergence of private rules, neglecting top-down processes such as treaty making. This article seeks to remedy this gap, using original archival material to show how a transnational network of experts associated with the International Chamber of Commerce influenced the negotiations of the United Nations Conference on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (1958) and its final content. In doing so, this article will analyse the ways in which the complex allegiances developed within the International Chamber of Commerce enabled it to match public authority and private interests in a transnational legal process where states no longer held a monopoly.

This chapter presents empirical content to the claims made in the first chapter, situating them in broad historical context. Part I examines how the generic problems of long-range trade have been resolved at different points in time, and how the present regime for international commercial arbitration is organized. Part II considers the consolidation of arbitral power over the past century. It pays particular attention to the evolution of authority relationships between tribunals and disputants (at the contractual level of analysis), between international arbitration centres and tribunals (within the judicial model), and between the arbitral order and national legal systems (in the context of the pluralist-constitutional model). The final part gives an overview of the evolution of treaty-based investor-state arbitration.

This chapter considers the evolution of arbitral procedure. The arbitral order’s autonomy is partly measured by its gradual emancipation from constraints of the seat of arbitration. It is also a function of international arbitration centres’ capacities to legislate codes of procedure, some provisions of which will be non-derogable and authoritative in other ways. The chapter focuses on how the International Chamber of Commerce [ICC] has revised its code over time, to serve its own policy choices and manage increasing adversarialism. The ICC Rules have become sophisticated, while remaining incomplete, and are under continuous construction. The chapter considers the code in light of three systemic goals: building the arbitral order’s effectiveness; maintaining efficiency; and securing the arbitral order’s autonomy regarding other legal systems. It compares this development with the situation in other ICAs, and at the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Precedent-based lawmaking enables and constrains the exercise of arbitral power, grounds discourse on the legitimacy of arbitral lawmaking and governance, and stokes demand for supervision and appeal. This chapter defines precedent as that stream of normative materials, issuing from past awards, which parties plead in submissions, and which tribunals rely upon when they justify their awards or their approach to decision-making. The chapter observes precedent in practice. It also distinguishes between ‘precedent’ and how much any tribunal believes itself to be constrained by precedential materials. It shows that tribunals in both international commercial and investor-state arbitration have gradually embraced the rule that the more ‘settled’ is the relevant case law, the weightier is the justificatory burden placed on any tribunal that would depart from it. Such a rule, if generally adopted, would significantly harden persuasive authority, adding express presumptions and burdens to the mix.