The Proliferation of International Courts and Tribunals: International Adjudication in Ascendance

Abstract

While there has been a significant focus on a few international tribunals, there have been insufficient efforts to compare and contrast the various courts and tribunals. Even a cursory comparison of these tribunals reveals that there are many unanswered questions regarding the interrelationship of these courts and tribunals and, more disturbing, a profound lack of attention to the collective impact these international tribunals are having on the field of international law. That is changing, as is evidenced by the new Project on International Courts and Tribunals at New York University School of Law, but we as an international legal community are still in the earliest stages of analyzing the importance of these new tribunals. This lecture will sample a few of the representative issues that merit further attention.