Law-making in complex processes: Theworld court and the modern law of state responsibility

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksChapterpeer-review

Authors

State responsibility and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have dominatedmuch of JamesCrawford’s activity during the last two decades. This chapter addresses a question situated at the intersection of these two themes: It evaluates the ICJ’s (as well as the Permanent Court of International Justice’s (PCIJ)) influence on the law of responsibility and asks to what extent has the current law of responsibility been shaped (or even ‘made’) by pronouncements of these two ‘World Courts’?What has been the relative impact of ICJ and PCIJ -compared to other ‘agencies of legal development’,1 and compared to their role in other fields of international law?2 These are the two questions on which this chapter seeks to shed some light. As the topic is huge, the treatment is broadbrush rather than nuanced. But as much of our current debate about responsibility is perhaps too granular, it may be defensible to step back and offer some reflections ‘from a distance’. The topic has been covered before, and there is no shortage of views. ‘The law of responsibility has always been essentially judge-made’, states Alain Pellet in a recent Festschrift contribution. James Crawford admits a little more diversity; according to him, ‘[t]he rules of state responsibility have been derived from cases, from practice, and from often unarticulated instantiations of general legal ideas’. And of course, though curiously missing from the two quotations, there is the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC), which rightly counts work on State responsibility among its major contributions to the codification and progressive development of international law. All these have contributed in some way to our understanding, and Patrick Daillier is no doubt right to emphasise the ‘interdependence of the various sources of law in the complex process of the formulation of the law on international responsibility’. But what are the respective roles played by the various ‘sources’ in the ‘complex process’, and where in particular has the PCIJ’s and ICJ’s jurisprudence made a difference? In order to address these questions, it is necessary to, first, demarcate the field of ‘State responsibility’ before tracing and assessing the two Courts’ contributions to it.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSovereignty, Statehood and State Responsibility : Essays in Honour of James Crawford
EditorsChristine Chinkin, Freya Beatens
Number of pages20
PublisherCambridge University Press
Publication date01.01.2015
Pages287-306
ISBN (print)9781107044258
ISBN (electronic)9781107360075
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.01.2015
Externally publishedYes

    Research areas

  • Law

Recently viewed

Researchers

  1. Ingeborg Warnke

Publications

  1. 2. Advent
  2. Design, construction, and operation of tailored permeable reactive barriers
  3. Work-in-Progress
  4. Managing Stress During Long-Term Internships
  5. Learning in environmental governance: opportunities for translating theory to practice
  6. The influence of the casting process on the creep properties of different AZ-based magnesium alloys
  7. States of Comparability
  8. The effect of grain refinement on hot tearing in AZ91D magnesium alloy
  9. Learning in participatory environmental governance – its antecedents and effects. Findings from a case survey meta-analysis
  10. A Global Synthesis of Jatropha Cultivation
  11. Plasma arcing during contact separation of HVDC relays
  12. Motivation und Verhalten
  13. Actor-Network Theory II
  14. Child Respondents - Do They Really Answer What Scientific Questionnaires Ask For?
  15. Rechtschreiblernen in der Sekundarstufe I
  16. Das digitale Bild gibt es nicht
  17. Zur ‚Privatisierung‘ von gewaltsamem Protest
  18. Microbial nutrient limitation and catalytic adjustments revealed from a long‐term nutrient restriction experiment
  19. The Role of Citizen Participation in Developing a New Energetically Efficient Quarter – Limitations and Success Factors
  20. Introduction
  21. Development and test of a dual-pathway model of personal and community factors driving new energy technology adoption - The case of V2G in three European countries
  22. Anspruch und Klage
  23. The tip of the iceberg: laptop music and the information-technological transformation of music
  24. Impacts of species richness on productivity in a large-scale subtropical forest experiment
  25. Stop thief!