[Lecture] Seeking Change through International Courts: Rethinking What Judicial Decisions Do in International Law

What role can international courts play in affecting change when it comes to long-standing, global issues, such as climate change and ongoing humanitarian crises?

Judicial decisions are key components of legal argumentation. Courts, counsels, and academics routinely refer to them when constructing their claims. Across the international legal discipline, they are invoked as evidence of how like cases have been decided, or to signal how a specific rule or principle has been authoritatively interpreted by previous courts and tribunals. However, Dr Lo Giacco invites us to take a closer look at what judicial decisions do in (and to) the practice of international law, revealing a far more intricate story.

By exploring what is entrenched in the iterative use of judicial decisions, Dr Lo Giacco highlights how judicial decisions can act as vehicles, reproducing world views and reasons for action, as well as reverberating language and concepts no longer in tune with today’s international law.

This lecture aims to unearth such features of judicial decisions in light of recent international practice, with a specific focus on proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). To do so, our esteemed panel will consider the practice of using judicial decisions in legal argumentation, including by the ICJ, and reflect on how a closer look at judicial decisions can shed light on normative assumptions, as well as concepts and lexicons that may no longer be compatible with current understandings of international law. In so doing, we will be invited to ponder and critically reflect on why many of us place so much hope in the ability of international courts to affect change, when it comes to long-standing, global issues, by way of judicial decision.

Panel: 

• Dr. Letizia Lo Giacco (Leiden University)
• Prof. Catherine Brölmann (University of Amsterdam)
• Judge Hilary Charlesworth (International Court of Justice)

The lecture is chaired by Dr. Carl Emilio Lewis (T.M.C. Asser Instituut). 

This event is organised by the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies and Asser's research strand ‘Regulation in the public interest: Disruptive technologies in peace and security’. This research strand addresses regulation to safeguard and promote public interests. It focuses, in particular, on the development of the international regulatory framework for the military applications of disruptive technologies and the arms race in conventional and non-conventional weapons. The public interest of peace and security serves as the prime conceptual framework in this strand.