A taxonomy of international rule of law institutions

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Abstract

This article revises and updates a seminal article written by the author in 1998, which was the first attempt to tally how many and what kind of international courts and tribunals existed at that point in time. It contained a chart that placed international courts and tribunals in a larger context, listing them alongside quasi-judicial bodies, implementation-control and other dispute settlement bodies. The present article has three aims. The first is to provide an update, since several new bodies have been created or have become active in the last decade. The second aim is a bit more ambitious. It is time to revise some of the categories and criteria of classification used back in 1998. More than a decade of scholarship in the field by legal scholars and political scientists has made it possible to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. The abundance of data over a sufficiently long time-span is making it possible to start moving away from a mere 'folk taxonomy' towards a more rigorous scientific classification. The hallmark of truly scientific classifications is that classifying is only the final step of a process, and a classification only the means to communicate the end results. Besides making it possible to discover and describe, scientific classifications crucially enable prediction of new entities and categories. Thus, the third aim of this article is to attempt to discern some trends and make some predictions about future developments in this increasingly relevant field of international law and relations.

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APA

Romano, C. P. R. (2011). A taxonomy of international rule of law institutions. Journal of International Dispute Settlement, 2(1), 241–277. https://doi.org/10.1093/jnlids/idq024

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