PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE


PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW,
AND JUSTICE*

By Paul B. Stephan

I. Introduction

Discussion of international law, as much as of any body of legal rules,
invites a distinction between inputs — the processes that convert prefer-
ences and beliefs into something recognized as “law” — and outputs — the
content of the legal rules generated by lawmaking processes. Most nor-
mative accounts of international law consider only the latter. Whether the
topic comprises the laws of war or the nature of international human
rights, discussion tends to focus on the content of the rule rather than its
provenance.

There exists, however, an older tradition that considers the normative
value of the international lawmaking process. It reaches back at least to
Jeremy Bentham. It maintains that the content of rules cannot be sepa-
rated from the means of their creation, and that lawmakers are more
likely to adopt substantively desirable rules when lawmaking is struc-
tured and constrained in a particular way.1

A focus on the lawmaking process, I submit, permits us to explore a
particular dimension of justice, namely the relationship between law and
liberty. Laws that reflect the arbitrary whims of the lawmaker are pre-
sumptively unjust, because they constrain liberty for no good reason. A
strategy for making the enactment of arbitrary laws less likely involves
recognizing checks on the lawmaker’s powers and grounding those checks
in processes that allow the governed to express their disapproval. The
system of checks and balances employed in the U.S. Constitution embod-
ies this strategy, although reasonable people can debate its efficacy. As the
economist A. O. Hirschman observed in an influential book, regimes that
permit free movement of persons and property similarly restrict the force
of arbitrary rules by allowing exit from unwanted restrictions.2 I want to
inquire into the role of checks in international lawmaking.

* I am indebted to Ken Abbott, Jean Cohen, Larry Helfer, Robert Hockett, Sean Murphy,
Phil Nichols, Ed Swaine, Joel Trachtman, the other contributors to this volume, and par-
ticipants in a workshop at the University of Virginia School of Law for comments and
criticism. Shortcomings are mine alone.

1 Jeremy Bentham, “Principles of International Law,” in John Bowring, ed., The Works of
Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2 (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1962), 540.

2 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations,
and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

© 2006 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA. 131



I recognize that other process values exist — in particular, transparency
and participation rights. I have discussed these issues in international
lawmaking elsewhere.3 I choose to focus here on “checking values” to
avoid a subtle problem that can enter into any discussion of participation
and transparency, namely an implicit assumption about the necessity of
lawmaking. Once we decide that a problem requires a collective and
coercive response, we want to ensure that the means of constructing that
response is both fair and expeditious. Transparency and participation
enhance the quality of a lawmaking process that moves inevitably toward
some action. A concern for liberty, in contrast, implies a conviction that
expedience sometimes must defer to fairness, and moreover that in some
cases the optimal outcome is inaction. A focus on checking rests on an
assumption that sometimes the interests of liberty require that a coercive
authority stay its hand. Most international-law specialists regard any
diminution in the scope of international law as a setback and therefore
refrain from going down an analytical path that might justify less law. I
therefore concentrate on checking to counteract an underlying expansion-
ist bias in international-law scholarship.4

Let me deal first with a preliminary, and I believe insubstantial, objec-
tion to the way in which I have framed the problem. At first blush, it
might appear that the fundamental principle of state consent provides all
the checking that international lawmaking needs. This principle holds
that a state (and by extension, its subjects) can be bound by a rule of
international law only if that state manifests its consent to the rule. As
long as states have a real choice, itself subject to internal checks on official
decision making, the adoption of the rule should meet basic criteria of
procedural justice. Indeed, the correlate of this principle — that each state
has a veto over the adoption of international law, at least as applied to the
state and its subjects — suggests that international lawmaking poses less of
a threat to liberty than do conventional municipal lawmaking processes
based on majority rule.5 One might think that, as a result of this principle,
no rule will attain the status of international law unless its adoption

3 See Paul B. Stephan, “Accountability and International Lawmaking: Rules, Rents, and
Legitimacy,” Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business 17, no. 2/3 (1996–97):
726–29; and Paul B. Stephan, “The New International Law — Legitimacy, Accountability,
Authority, and Freedom in the New Global Order,” University of Colorado Law Review 70,
no. 4 (1999): 1580–82.

4 Typical is work over the last quarter-century by Professor Louis Henkin, the Reporter of
the Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States and perhaps the most
prominent and admired U.S. professor of international law. For a representative example of
his expansionist approach to international law, see Louis Henkin, “U.S. Ratification of
Human Rights Conventions: The Ghost of Senator Bricker,” American Journal of International
Law 89, no. 2 (1995): 348–50. For an account of the shifts in Henkin’s position over the last
forty years, see Paul B. Stephan, “Courts, the Constitution, and Customary International
Law,” Virginia Journal of International Law 44, no. 1 (2003): 37–47.

5 According to the usage of international-law scholars, “municipal” law refers to the
domestic law of particular states, whether national or local.

132 PAUL B. STEPHAN



makes some states better off and no state worse off, because no state
would embrace a rule that has greater costs than benefits.6

One still might argue that state consent is an insufficient safeguard for
liberty, because particular states might consent to international obliga-
tions that the great majority of their subjects find objectionable. States
might sacrifice the welfare of their subjects to obtain benefits for their
rulers or for special groups with whom the rulers are allied. Dictatorships
provide an obvious case where states may constitute disloyal agents, but
even democracies face such problems.7 I elide this issue here, because
even if states were perfect agents, it would not follow that international
lawmaking represents a remarkable instance of exclusively Pareto out-
comes, that is, a process that benefits at least some participants and makes
none worse off.

For an important range of cases, state consent is not a condition for a
rule having the force of international law. First, many specialists argue
for the existence of jus cogens or peremptory norms that apply regardless
of state consent.8 Second, the concept of state consent is artful, and oppor-
tunistic decision makers have some freedom to construe consent in
ways that circumvent conventional checking processes. Third, political
and economic pressure can reduce state consent to an empty formality
due to the state’s lack of effective options. I discuss each of these points
in turn.

For at least the last sixty years, jurists have argued that the international
legal system contains some fundamental rules that must exist for inter-

6 By “rule,” I mean a command that limits in some way the autonomy that a subject of
international law otherwise would enjoy. The rule might reside in a treaty or similar formal
instrument, or, more controversially, it might be part of an unwritten body of norms that
specialists call “customary international law.” For analysis of the analogous problem regard-
ing unanimous voting that arises when creating a constitution, see James M. Buchanan, The
Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975);
and Dennis C. Mueller, Constitutional Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
65–67.

7 As public choice theory predicts, lawmakers concerned with reelection make laws,
including international commitments, that benefit discrete and powerful groups at the
expense of the general welfare. I discuss this dynamic and provide examples in Stephan,
“Accountability and International Lawmaking.”

8 The Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States defines jus cogens
or peremptory norms as follows:

Some rules of international law are recognized by the international community of
states as peremptory, permitting no derogation. These rules prevail over and invali-
date international agreements and other rules of international law in conflict with
them. Such a peremptory norm is subject to modification only by a subsequent norm
of international law having the same character. It is generally accepted that the prin-
ciples of the United Nations Charter prohibiting the use of force . . . have the character
of jus cogens.

American Law Institute, Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States
(Philadelphia: American Law Institute, 1987), sec. 102, comment k. This prestigious but
unofficial source about international law is itself controversial, and not all courts regard all
its pronouncements as correct. United States v. Yousef, 327 F.3d 56, 99 –103 (2d Cir. 2003).

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 133



national law to be law, and that these rules operate prior to and inde-
pendent of state consent. The war crimes trials that followed World War II,
for example, meted out punishment for violations of rules of fundamental
humanity and decency and treated the question of whether Germany or
Japan had agreed to respect these rules as irrelevant. In the case of Japan,
the deliberate decision of the Imperial Government not to adopt the 1929
Geneva Convention Relating to the Treatment of Prisoners of War made
no difference in the judgments, many capital, imposed on the accused.
Contemporary commentators argue that a number of rules, such as pro-
hibitions of genocide and torture, operate universally and independently
of the various conventions that codify those norms.9

Putting jus cogens rules aside, what constitutes state consent may depend
on the views and authority of the decision maker. At one extreme, par-
liamentary adoption of a rule of international law mirrors the process of
municipal lawmaking, and largely satisfies whatever process values the
adopting state observes. At the other extreme, lawmakers with little dem-
ocratic accountability (for example, judges with life tenure) might embrace
the rule in the face of opposition by the political branches. Bentham
worried much about the judges, because of what he saw as the obscu-
rantist and secret methods of judicial lawmaking and the unrepresenta-
tive nature of the judiciary.

Beside judicial lawmaking, delegation of rulemaking authority to a
third party — say, an international body such as the European Com-
mission — also circumvents, in practice if not in form, the principle of
sovereign consent. The initial delegation may satisfy municipal process
values, but if it encompasses a self-executing authority — as is the case for
much of the lawmaking powers of the organs of the European Commu-
nity (EC)10 — then rules created pursuant to the delegation may come
about without significant checks. Moreover, if independent actors — in
particular, domestic courts — possess and exercise the authority to enforce
the rules generated by the exercise of delegated authority (again, as is the
case for EC law), not much remains of sovereign consent.11

9 M. Cherif Bassiouni, “International Crimes: Jus Cogens and Obligatio Erga Omnes,”
Law and Contemporary Problems 59, no. 4 (1996): 63–74.

10 The European Community (until 1992, the European Economic Community) is the
most important, and legally and institutionally the most developed, part of the European
Union. It has lawmaking bodies (the Commission, the Council, and the European Parlia-
ment) as well as a judiciary (the Court of Justice). See note 21 below.

11 The 1957 Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, implies,
but does not explicitly state, both that the European Court of Justice (the Luxembourg court)
has the authority to deliver authoritative and binding interpretations of Community law,
and that the various national courts of the member states have an obligation to apply
Community law in favor of national law, even if that means invalidating domestic legisla-
tion. Decisions of the Luxembourg court articulated these conclusions, which the courts of
the member states in turn accepted and implemented. For further discussion, see Paul B.
Stephan, Francesco Parisi, and Ben F. W. Depoorter, The Law and Economics of the European
Union (Charlottesville, VA: LexisNexis, 2003), 294–325.

134 PAUL B. STEPHAN



Finally, states may have the formal authority to reject a rule of inter-
national law but, because of conditions of economic or political depen-
dency, may lack the effective capacity to make a choice. A common example
involves the financial and economic policy requirements imposed by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) on debtor states: a sovereign state can
refuse to comply with IMF demands, but only if it accepts the loss of
access to foreign capital as the price of its independence.12 Similarly, a
member of the World Trade Organization or the European Union theo-
retically could denounce its obligations under those international regimes,
but the costs of extricating a state from the intertwined relationships
captured in these arrangements make such a divorce a daunting prospect.13

Once state consent ceases to constrain international lawmaking, the
question of alternative checks to protect liberty looms. Under what cir-
cumstances does the international lawmaking process as currently con-
stituted present a threat of arbitrary force? What kinds of resistance to the
results of international lawmaking can process values justify?

I address these questions in three steps. First, I explore whether inter-
national law does carry a threat of coercion. If not, concerns about arbi-
trary restrictions of liberty are misplaced. Second, I discuss the problems
arising from delegations of lawmaking authority to international institu-
tions, with specific reference to the 1998 Rome Statute and the body it
established, the International Criminal Court. Third, I discuss the process-
value issues associated with judicial lawmaking. None of these concerns
justifies blanket opposition to international lawmaking. Rather, those inter-
ested in making and enforcing international rules need to grapple with
these issues and provide another layer of justification for their efforts.

II. International Law as a Potential Threat to Liberty

Legal rules affect liberty in at least two ways. Rules may contribute to
the establishment of a reasonably secure political, social, cultural, and
economic order that provides a foundation for voluntary interactions and
personal flourishing. The concept of “ordered liberty” captures this first
function. In addition, rules can restrict the choices made within the frame-
work of ordered liberty. A rule forbidding murder falls into the first
category, while one punishing criticism of political authority falls into the
second. In normative terms, first-category rules advance the values embed-
ded in liberty, while second-category rules restrict liberty. Categorization
depends heavily on context, rather than on a priori principles.

12 Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, “The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of
International Organizations,” International Organization 53, no. 4 (1999): 699 –732.

13 Not to mention the opinion of some that a right unilaterally to secede from the Euro-
pean Community does not exist. See Joseph H. H. Weiler, “Alternatives to Withdrawal from
an International Organization: The Case of the European Economic Community,” Israel Law
Review 20, nos. 2–3 (1985).

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 135



For rules to function in either way, however, some mechanism must
exist to induce compliance. In municipal law, the state’s coercive power
(where it exists) supplies the most obvious means of enforcement, either
directly or as a background threat. Other pathways to compliance include
informal social sanctions. More problematically, some theorists also believe
in a process of rule internalization, through which individuals impose
psychic costs on themselves for rule transgressions and psychic rewards
for rule compliance.14

International law as conventionally conceived seems to exclude all means
of inducing compliance save informal social sanctions. The international
community, as opposed to individual states, supposedly lacks coercive
power, and societies ex definitio lack interior lives and psychic states.15

Accordingly, the compliance literature for the most part concentrates on
how reputation and retaliation serve to induce states to observe inter-
national law.16

More recently, however, scholars have identified ways in which inter-
national law can have directly coercive effect. International tribunals can
issue monetary or punitive judgments that states perceive as having direct
effect and therefore uncritically implement. Domestic tribunals can apply
international rules in a self-perceived capacity of agent for the inter-
national lawmaker.17 To be sure, these examples rest ultimately on the
willingness of national governments and other actors to fulfill their roles
in administering coercive sanctions. But this reservation is also true of
municipal law, which depends fundamentally on the willingness of indi-
viduals to play their part in the execution of the law.

Moreover, most legal academics seem to favor extending the coercive
power and reach of international law. To take just one prominent exam-
ple, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has generated a cottage indus-
try of largely celebratory work, even though it has yet to take on its first
case.18 The ICC, which came into being in 2002, represents a culmination
of decades of work, led by the United States, to establish a permanent
international body to investigate and prosecute human rights violations
arising out of political and social catastrophes. Previously, the United
Nations Security Council had established tribunals on an ad hoc basis to

14 Robert Cooter, “Do Good Laws Make Good Citizens? An Economic Analysis of Inter-
nalized Norms,” Virginia Law Review 86, no. 8 (2000): 1577–1601.

15 Individual states do have the capacity to impose significant sanctions, including eco-
nomic punishment and, in extreme cases, use of force. International bodies, as opposed to
individual states, may lend their approval to such actions, but they lack the capacity directly
to bring them about.

16 Andrew T. Guzman, “A Compliance-Based Theory of International Law,” California Law
Review 90, no. 8 (2002): 1844–51. For recent work exploring a sociology of state compliance
with international law, see Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks, “How to Influence States:
Socialization and International Human Rights Law,” Duke Law Journal 53, no. 3 (2004).

17 Robert E. Scott and Paul B. Stephan, “Self-Enforcing International Agreements and the
Limits of Coercion,” Wisconsin Law Review n.v., no. 2 (2004): 599 –614.

18 To be precise, the court itself has yet to take up any case, although the prosecutor has
commenced investigations into various atrocities alleged to have occurred in East Africa.

136 PAUL B. STEPHAN



deal with particular disasters. The United States ultimately opposed the
final version of the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, because it allows
the ICC’s prosecutor and judges to decide on their own whether to act,
rather than awaiting referral of a case from the Security Council (the
practice with the ad hoc tribunals). Professors of international law mostly
have deplored the U.S. position. More generally, the U.S. professoriat, by
numbers and stature, overwhelmingly favors the exercise of judicial power,
both international and domestic, to punish violations of international law;
and Commonwealth and European scholars seem largely to envy, on
behalf of their national courts, the power that U.S. judges wield. Thus,
even if at present the coercive, and potentially liberty-threatening, dimen-
sions of international lawmaking seem marginal, the weight of opinion
would wish this lawmaking to acquire great instrumental power.

Accordingly, without exaggerating the practical significance of the issue,
we can regard some instances of international lawmaking as coercive and
therefore a potential threat to liberty. Individuals have been jailed (and in
the case of the post–World War II proceedings, hanged) as a result of the
decisions of international criminal courts, and a permanent body to carry
out the prosecution and punishment of international crimes now exists.
Litigants have used domestic courts to sue individuals and firms for large
sums because of purported violations of international law. Business reg-
ulation increasingly turns on the decisions of international bodies. The
enforceability and interpretation of a widening range of contracts turns
on the meaning of international law. Each of these instances contains the
potential of arbitrary encroachments on liberty.

By no means do I wish to suggest that all international lawmaking is
presumptively a threat to liberty, much less that it does not contribute to
the ordering of liberty necessary for human flourishing and freedom.
Coercion brought against, for example, persons guilty of torture and
murder does not set off many alarm bells. The point, rather, is that when-
ever enactment of a law creates the possibility of coercion, one legiti-
mately can ask whether the processes involved in its enactment contain at
least minimal safeguards to discourage the arbitrary exercise of power.

I also concede that whether given procedures satisfy process values
depends on context, and that the contexts of international lawmaking
differ in many respects from the context of domestic lawmaking. Because
there is no such thing as an international government per se, clear sepa-
ration of powers, much less elaborate checks and balances, is hard to
construct. Because direct election of legislators is virtually absent (the
European Parliament providing the only counterexample, and that a qual-
ified one), the problem of lawmaker accountability necessarily involves
agency questions.19 In some instances, the power of national states to

19 By an agency question, I mean the possibility that an agent (here, an international
body) has different incentives than does its principal (here, the people for whom the inter-
national body acts). ~continued on next page!

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 137



reject rules of international law substitutes for separation of powers and
checks and balances, but, as I observed above, this mechanism does not
always work.

My point, in sum, is that some international rules can be sufficiently
coercive to justify an inquiry into the suitability of the lawmaking pro-
cesses that generated these rules. What constitutes a minimally acceptable
lawmaking process is a difficult question, and a simple analogy to domes-
tic lawmaking is an insufficient response. But the growing presence of
international rules in contemporary life, and the ambitions of some for an
even greater role for these rules, invites an inquiry into the legitimacy of
their genesis, interpretation, and application.

III. International Institutions as a Potential
Threat to Liberty

Imagine a treaty under which several states agree to establish an inter-
national agency invested with the authority to issue binding pronounce-
ments regarding some set of topics. To make the problem more interesting,
imagine that the treaty posits that the agency’s determinations about its
authority to issue particular pronouncements cannot be challenged in
national courts. Further imagine that the treaty obligates each signatory
to implement the agency’s determinations, and in particular to give them
“the full force of law.”

This lawmaking structure is far from hypothetical. Substitute “Consti-
tution” for “treaty” and “Supreme Court of the United States” for “inter-
national agency” and we have the structure of U.S. constitutional law
(albeit due to evolved understandings rather than because of the written
text of the document).20 The 1957 Treaty of Rome constitutes the Euro-
pean Court of Justice in similar fashion, and the 1950 European Conven-
tion on Human Rights does much the same for the European Court of
Human Rights. The 1945 Articles of Agreement of the International Mon-
etary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Develop-
ment (better known as the World Bank) arrogate an adjudicatory function
for the respective executive bodies of these institutions. The 1998 Rome
Statute for the International Criminal Court puts that court in the position

As a result of the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam and the 2001 Treaty of Nice, the European
Parliament, which comprises members directly elected by voters in the member states,
acquired an expanded role in the creation of the legislation of the European Community. But
the Community’s other lawmaking organs, the European Commission and the European
Council, selected by the members’ governments, still dominate the process. For discussion,
see Stephan, Parisi, and Depoorter, The Law and Economics of the European Union, 247–53.

20 That is to say, the Supreme Court of the United States acquired the power to render
authoritative and binding interpretations of the Constitution as a result of gradual public
acceptance of its claim that it possessed this power, rather than because of any express
language in the Constitution so providing.

138 PAUL B. STEPHAN



of resolving a number of issues involving the scope and meaning of
international criminal law.21

Consider in particular what kinds of questions the International Crim-
inal Court must address, how it must address them, and the conse-
quences of its choices. The Rome Statute authorizes punishment of four
generic crimes — genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and
aggression. The last category is contingent on the later adoption of a
definition of that class of crimes, because the authors of the statute con-
cluded that the concept of aggression at present lacks sufficient clarity
and acceptance to support prosecutions. The statute’s definitions of the
three crimes currently proscribed contain many illustrations, but each
rests ultimately on stated general principles that invite elaboration and
expansion. To take just one of these proscribed acts, a “crime against
humanity” entails imprisonment “in violation of the fundamental rules of
international law” without further specification, in addition to “persecu-
tion” on the basis of, inter alia, politics or ethnic, cultural, or religious
differences. But what norm constitutes a “fundamental” rule of inter-
national law? What acts amount to “persecution”? How are we to deter-
mine the causal links between persecution and difference? These are
questions of critical importance that only organs of the ICC can resolve.22

Much the same goes for other important questions, such as the existence
of excuses or justifications for otherwise criminal behavior.23 Finally, in
every particular case, the court must determine either that no state with
jurisdiction over an offense is conducting an investigation, or that states
that have conducted or are conducting an investigation are unable or
unwilling “genuinely” to act.24

It is exactly the process by which the prosecutor and the court must
make these fundamental substantive choices that is troubling. Under the
terms of the Rome Statute, the prosecutor and the court act hermetically.
Each must convince itself of the plausibility of its interpretations, and the
court may refuse to accept the prosecutor’s determinations. But no out-

21 The Treaty of Rome (1957) created the European Economic Community, which the 1992
Maastricht Treaty renamed as the European Community. The European Community is the
principal element of the European Union. The Council of Europe, a body of states that
antedates the organizations that became the European Union and that always has had more
members than those organizations, promulgated the 1950 European Convention on Human
Rights, which in turn established the Strasbourg court. At the end of World War II, the
victors established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) to organize and reform the international
financial system. The Soviet Union participated in the negotiations that produced the Arti-
cles of Agreement for the IMF and the World Bank, but it and its satellites declined to join
those organizations.

22 See Paul B. Stephan, “International Governance and American Democracy,” Chicago
Journal of International Law 1, no. 2 (2000): 253–56.

23 See Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks, “Law in the Heart of Darkness: Atrocity and Duress,”
Virginia Journal of International Law 43, no. 3 (2003): 867–69.

24 See Paul B. Stephan, “U.S. Constitutionalism and International Law: What the
Multilateralist Move Leaves Out,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 2, no. 1 (2004):
13–14.

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 139



side body can override these decisions. By the terms of article 16 of the
statute, the United Nations Security Council may order a one-year delay
of an investigation or prosecution, but such action would require the
consent of all five permanent members of the Security Council and in any
event would not be conclusive.

In effect, then, the prosecutor and the judges — each subject to no out-
side review once selected for a nonrenewable nine-year term — have the
power to decide whether individual states have “genuinely” pursued an
offense, whether particular conduct constitutes an offense, and what con-
stitutes an acceptable excuse or justification for conduct otherwise con-
stituting an offense. They must make these determinations in the face of
scanty precedent or historical background, and in contexts that often
implicate deep geopolitical antagonisms. They do have access to a bur-
geoning body of scholarly advice about how they should go about their
work, but this, as scholarship typically does, contains as many points of
view as there are authors. At bottom, only such internal constraints rooted
in the construction of professional identities as these actors might possess
(if any) constrain their exercise of significant coercive power.

What the Europeans call the Luxembourg and Strasbourg courts — the
EC’s European Court of Justice (in Luxembourg) and the Council of
Europe’s European Court of Human Rights (in Strasbourg) — present sim-
ilar issues. At the same time, some differences between these bodies, and
between them and the ICC, are apparent. Although the Luxembourg
court has final say on the interpretation of the Treaty of Rome (the foun-
dational instrument of the European Community), the existence of a sep-
arate EC lawmaking process complicates and to some extent confounds
the court’s freedom of action. Moreover, the court’s jurisdiction does not
extend beyond the twenty-five members of the EC. Finally, even though
the court’s decrees are said to have direct effect, they have practical sig-
nificance only to the extent that national governments comply with them.
The Luxembourg court has evinced a fairly high degree of tolerance for
foot-dragging and circumvention, suggesting that less coercion attends its
edicts than one might assume. Finally, the Luxembourg court has carried
on in various forms for fifty years, creating a history that provides an
additional layer of constraint.

The Strasbourg court is nested in a different institutional structure. It
has functioned in one capacity or another since 1959, but only since 1998
have all persons with human rights claims against the forty-four states
bound by the European Convention enjoyed an unqualified right to file
suit.25 Due at least in part to this structural change, the twenty-first cen-

25 Protocol 11, Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Free-
doms, European Treaty Series no. 155, effective November 1, 1998. Before the amendment,
individuals could only direct a request for investigation and prosecution of human rights
violations to the European Human Rights Commission, an independent international body
created by the European Convention. For a discussion of the pre-1998 practice of European

140 PAUL B. STEPHAN



tury has seen a remarkable increase in the number of the court’s contro-
versial decisions, such as those concerning the rights of sexual minorities,
the right to die, and the procedures for conducting police investigations.26

The Strasbourg court faces no counterpart legislative or executive organs,
unlike the Luxembourg court. Moreover, the Strasbourg court’s ability to
enforce its decisions through fines operates fairly automatically, limiting
the power of intransigent states to undermine its judgments.27

I discuss these bodies because they present the most straightforward
instances of delegation of coercive lawmaking power to an international
body. Other instances of potentially greater significance exist. Under legal
theories that enjoy wide circulation in the academic community and mod-
est support in some domestic courts, various international bureaucracies,
such as the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the Inter-
national Committee of the Red Cross, enjoy a more diffuse power to
create “customary international law,” which some courts regard as bind-
ing. Were this theory to gain widespread credence, many international
bodies would take on the role of coercive lawmakers.

For two reasons, however, I defer discussion of these bodies to the next
section. First, at present the claims for their lawmaking capacity are out-
liers rather than mainstream legal doctrine. Second, their actions take
on the nature of customary international law only if courts reach this
conclusion. The legitimacy of this process thus is part of a broader in-
quiry about domestic common law methods as means of international
lawmaking.

Are the constraints that currently operate on the International Criminal
Court, the European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human
Rights sufficient to protect against arbitrary restrictions of liberty? One
possible response is that every constitutional court, most particularly the
Supreme Court of the United States, functions in this manner, and most
people consider the development and empowerment of these institutions
a good thing. Why shouldn’t these international courts work as well as
these national courts do?

states in response to rulings of the Strasbourg court, see Tom Barkhuysen, Michiel van
Emmerik, and Piet Hein van Kempen, eds., The Execution of Strasbourg and Geneva Human
Rights Decisions in the National Legal Order (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1999).

26 Atlan v. United Kingdom, 34 European Human Rights Reports 33 (2002) (ex parte hear-
ings to consider government privilege to withhold evidence in criminal trial); Pretty v.
United Kingdom, 35 European Human Rights Reports 1 (2002) (right to die); I. v. United
Kingdom, 36 European Human Rights Reports 53 (2002) (rights of transgendered); Beck, Copp,
and Bazeley v. United Kingdom (48535/99) [2002] ECHR 679 (October 22, 2002) (right of
homosexuals to serve in armed services).

27 Monetary awards issued by the Strasbourg court become debts that constitute a straight-
forward obligation of the defendant state. According to the website of the court: “To date
States which have been ordered to make payments under Article 50 have consistently done
so.” Since 1996, the court has added interest charges to judgments not satisfied within three
months. http://www.echr.coe.int/Eng/EDocs/EffectsOfJudgments.html (accessed March
16, 2005).

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 141



The most obvious rejoinder is that international organs are different
from national courts. To begin with, they draw on agents from different
states with various cultures, historical experiences, and professional iden-
tities. They confront a greater range of contested issues than do most
bodies, and they do so without the benefit of an unstated cultural con-
sensus or broad historical memory. Yes, most institutions may go through
a period of foundational angst, during which the absence of a developed
institutional culture or guidance from precedent may complicate choices
about appropriate actions. But the international organs present an aggra-
vated case. The Supreme Court of the United States, for instance, enjoyed
the benefit of its justices’ common grounding in British common law, a
frame of reference that they shared with virtually all lawyers of their day.
Nothing similar binds the ICC or the Strasbourg or Luxembourg courts.

The absence of cultural and historical constraints might not matter as
much if these organs largely engaged in technocratic exercises to reach
important but obscure results. One could imagine an international tribu-
nal that, for example, settled disputes over the ownership of particular
locations on the radio spectrum based exclusively on issues of engineer-
ing and simple rules of allocational priority. Interestingly, the real-world
analog to this hypothetical organ — the dispute resolution services of the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which
deals with ownership of internet domain names — does not purport to
bind national legal systems, which remain free to reject ICANN out-
comes.28 An analogous process, the settlement of investment disputes by
international arbitration, has generated heated criticism exactly for its
narrow focus on property rights at the expense of other values.29 The
mandates of the ICC and the Luxembourg and Strasbourg courts go far
beyond technocratic problems, however. They extend to deep and cul-
turally divisive issues such as the duty to refuse an illegitimate order, the
role of amnesty and reconciliation in the wake of conflict, the balance
between press freedom and protection of individual reputation and group
sensitivities, and the rights, powers, and immunities of members of mar-
ginalized groups.

There is a point of view that maintains that institutions not subject to
conventional democratic constraints ought to resolve emotionally charged
and divisive issues, because democracy breaks down under stress. Accord-
ing to this argument, resolution of fundamental problems requires rea-
soned deliberation, which a society awash in passion cannot sustain. In

28 The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a nonprofit corporation
established in the Commonwealth of Virginia to administer the domain name assignment
system. All contracts for domain names now contain a clause providing for arbitration of
ownership disputes under ICANN rules. For a fuller description of the legal basis of this
process, see Barcelona.com, Inc. v. Excelentisimo Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, United States Court
of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, 330 F.3d 617 (2003).

29 See Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah, International Law on Foreign Investment, 2d ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

142 PAUL B. STEPHAN



lieu of neglecting these problems, a nation can turn to disinterested deci-
sion makers operating behind a cloak of moral authority.30 For propo-
nents of this argument, a different system of checks must apply to such
tribunals. Rather than submitting their decisions to formal institutional
constraints, the wielders of this power instead must display due regard
for the limits of their moral authority. This intangible constraint, in turn,
implicates an alliance between the tribunal and its commentators, as the
weight of scholarly opinion presumably can bolster or reduce the author-
ity behind a controversial decision.

Even as applied to a well-entrenched and successful institution such as
the Supreme Court of the United States, this argument invites consider-
able skepticism. Whatever the particular endowments of the Supreme
Court justices, their collective ability to sense the intangible limits on their
authority is impaired by the cloistered lives that their institutional roles
impose on them. Institutional checks on an organ’s lawmaking powers
exist precisely because individual judgment and discretion are not always
sufficient to prevent great blunders. The history of the Supreme Court’s
more ambitious constitutional decision making — the infamous Dred Scott
decision, only the second occasion on which the Court struck down a
federal statute, comes to mind31 — suggests why something more than
intuitive self-restraint may be necessary.32

An extension of the democracy-breakdown argument to an inter-
national tribunal seems especially implausible. The idea that such insti-
tutions from their inception will wield sufficient moral authority to
overcome deep conflict strikes me as wishful thinking. The probability
that jurists from different nations can build coalitions that withstand local
passions and entrenched political opposition veers toward nil. More likely
is the rise of perceptions that particular decisions represent national prej-
udice. The prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic by the UN’s special court
for the former Yugoslavia (a precursor of the ICC) appears to have united
Serbs in a conviction that the rest of Europe hates them, rather than
leading them to the realization that their former leader had disgraced
their nation with his policies. Conflicts between the British House of
Lords and the Strasbourg court give the impression that a controlling
majority of the human rights tribunal has thrown its lot in with a Franco-

30 See Cass Sunstein, “Constitutionalism and Seccession,” University of Chicago Law Review
58, no. 3 (1991): 69 –70.

31 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1856). This infamous Supreme Court
decision invalidated the Missouri Compromise, a congressional enactment intended to limit
the spread of slavery to new territories of the United States, on the ground that the legis-
lation infringed constitutionally protected interests of slave owners. The first instance of
Supreme Court invalidation of federal legislation was Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch)
137 (1803), a decision involving the power of Congress to assign certain cases to the Court’s
jurisdiction.

32 See Cass Sunstein, “The Dred Scott Case with Notes on Affirmative Action, the Right
to Die, and Same-Sex Marriage,” The Green Bag 1, no. 1 (1997).

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 143



German cabal intent on undermining traditional underpinnings of British
liberty in favor of a continental conception of social-democratic dirigisme.33

The point is not that in either case these fears are well founded, but rather
that they exist and may become more powerful with the growth and
development of international tribunals.

One might sensibly respond that all international organs, the ICC and
the Luxembourg and Strasbourg courts included, operate under one basic
constraint, namely the process for choosing their members. A selection
process that allows for state dissent, combined with limited terms for the
persons selected, sets up an ex ante check on what an organ can do. States
may miscalculate what a judge will do once seated — the United States has
some familiarity with this problem — but, with some delay, they can cor-
rect for that.

In some instances where discretion is concentrated in a single person,
such as the prosecutor of the ICC, the selection power, or more precisely
the power not to reappoint, may serve as a check on the actor. In other
cases, the selection power may deter extreme deviations from an organ’s
stated responsibilities. Often, however, the structure of selection of mem-
bers of these organs militates against discipline. The common practice of
international tribunals, including the ICC and the Luxembourg and
Strasbourg courts, entails allocating positions to individual states or cohe-
sive blocs of states. As a result, stable coalitions can form to marginalize
persons selected by dissident states. In the case of the ICC, for example,
a single judge selected by the United States could not defeat a coalition of
states hostile to U.S. exercises of power, a scenario that is far from
hypothetical.34

I do not mean to suggest that any of these tribunals face an insurmount-
able hurdle. It is not inconceivable that the ICC, for example, might
simultaneously avoid taking on any deeply controversial cases while
dealing with those obvious outrages that occur. Perhaps, over a decade or
more, the leadership of the court might acquire a reputation for balanced
action and careful exercise of its powers, thereby accruing moral author-
ity and general respect. But this would take luck as well as prudence.
Were a conflict to arise that pitted great powers against each other or

33 The British courts and the Strasbourg court have differed in several instances, including
disagreements over the proper elements of the criminal justice process, Atlan v. United
Kingdom, 34 European Human Rights Reports 33 (2002) (rejecting rule of Regina v. Davis,
[1993] 2 All English Reports 643 [C.A.], on obligation of prosecution to disclose statements
of confidential informants); over the extent of tort immunity for police officers, Osman v.
United Kingdom, 29 European Human Rights Reports 245 (2000) (rejecting decision of Osman
v. Ferguson, [1993] 4 All English Reports 344 [C.A.], on scope of immunity); and over the
existence of a privilege under the law of defamation for comment on public figures, Reynolds
v. Times Newspapers, [2001] Appellate Cases 127 (H.L.) (disregarding Strasbourg court
decisions).

34 For an earlier treatment of this problem that did not consider the possibility of stable
coalitions, see Paul B. Stephan, “Courts, Tribunals, and Legal Unification — The Agency
Problem,” Chicago Journal of International Law 3, no. 2 (2002): 336–38.

144 PAUL B. STEPHAN



otherwise seriously divided world opinion, the tribunal would find it
exceedingly hard to seem neither partisan nor toothless.

In the case of the ICC, the risks seem especially unnecessary. An obvi-
ous model of easily imposed institutional checks existed at the time of the
adoption of the Rome Statute. Since the creation of the United Nations, all
war crimes tribunals depended on authorization by the Security Council,
a body that acts only in the absence of the disapproval of any of the five
traditional nuclear powers.35 In the past, each opportunity for inter-
national intervention in the face of domestic inability to redress gross
misconduct depended on the existence of the level of consensus that
Security Council action entails. Requiring the ICC to await a Security
Council resolution before taking jurisdiction over any particular conflict —
the position for which the United States continues to hold out, and the
reason for its refusal to ratify the 1998 Rome Statute — would have pre-
served this institutional structure.

In the abstract, one might see a contradiction between the creation of an
institution intended to bring the most terrible kinds of crimes to justice
and the retention of a great-power veto over its actions. This objection,
however, rests on confusion of the two bases of the ICC’s jurisdiction.
Credible allegations of the commission of an international crime, one
should recall, by themselves are insufficient to justify action by the ICC.
The ICC also must determine that no state possesses the capacity and
desire to engage in a “genuine” effort to prosecute. Its jurisdiction, in
other words, depends fundamentally on a determination that state-level
action has failed. This latter consideration, unlike the determination of the
existence of the elements of a crime, rests on irreducibly political and
contestable considerations.

The Security Council is an appropriate body to make judgments about
national incapacity to prosecute international crimes. Expecting a free-
standing international institution to go after superpowers seems bizarre.
In no other area touching on fundamental interests of a great power do
we expect the United Nations to impose its will. It is not excessively
cynical to believe that the proponents of the ICC who rejected the U.S.
position did so largely out of a conviction that the threat to act against
great powers would be empty, but that its hollowness would go unno-
ticed in at least some quarters.

I see nothing objectionable in general about a great-power veto over
certain kinds of UN actions. One can embrace the concept of fundamental
equality of all people without extending it to states: the United Nations
since its inception has embraced the principle that some states are more
equal than others. Each great power can prevent the United Nations from

35 The five great powers — the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and China — do
not have to endorse an action of the Security Council, but for any decision to have effect
none must exercise its veto. The establishment of past ad hoc war crimes tribunals involved
either the active support or passive acquiescence of all five.

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 145



authorizing sanctions against itself or its clients. Allowing great powers
also to have a veto over capacity-to-prosecute determinations seems a
natural extension of the present structure of the international order.

The Strasbourg court represents a different set of institutional prob-
lems. On the one hand, the Council of Europe has no counterpart to the
UN’s Security Council: there is no club of regional powers that possesses
a veto over actions undertaken on behalf of the Council of Europe. Con-
straining the court’s mandate, itself only recently unleashed, thus would
involve the construction of a new institution. On the other hand, the
court’s coercive power, although real enough, is less than that of a com-
parable common law court. In particular, it lacks the power to nullify
laws or practices of which it disapproves or to order nonmonetary pun-
ishment for persons who disobey its mandates. Individual states thus can
resist its orders at the cost of the payment of fines. Sufficient resistance, in
turn, might deter the court from undertaking more challenging projects.

My broader point does not concern the particular value of the ICC, the
Strasbourg court, or similar institutions. Rather, I wish to respond to the
tendency of many scholars to see these organs as the wave of the future.36

Judicial bodies no less than other instruments of state power can flourish
under conditions of limited power. As more international organs acquire
self-executing powers that can operate without substantial state cooper-
ation, greater effort will be required to devise checks other than with-
drawal of state consent. The current imbroglio over the refusal of the U.S.
to recognize the ICC sheds some light on potential alternatives as well as
illustrating the politics of institutional maximalism.

IV. Domestic Enforcement of International Law
as a Potential Threat to Liberty

Different checking problems arise when independent national courts
create, interpret, and impose international law. The problems are subtle,
because the means of judicial lawmaking vary among systems and the
uses of international law vary from analogy to direct authority. National
courts also may differ in what sources and methods they use to ascertain
what constitutes international law. Each of these factors can complicate
the question of whether international lawmaking by national courts
presents distinctive issues of accountability and constraint.

One important difference between national and international courts is
that international institutions have acquired coercive powers relatively
recently, and the most interesting and possibly worrisome cases involve
proposals for future powers. As a result, institutional-design issues remain

36 See, e.g., Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Judicial Globalization,” Virginia Journal of International
Law 40, no. 4 (2000): 1124; and Jenny S. Martinez, “Toward an International Judicial System,”
Stanford Law Review 56, no. 2 (2003): 432.

146 PAUL B. STEPHAN



central. Domestic courts, by contrast, constitute facts on the ground. The
common-law courts in particular have rich as well as lengthy histories.
Accordingly, it seems unrealistic to talk about reforming domestic courts
as a means of limiting their ability to resort to international law. Rather,
more subtle issues of cultural norms and prestige arise.

In the United States, discussion of the role of international law in domes-
tic adjudication often involves one of two categorical claims, each of
which I wish to criticize. First, some authorities have suggested that
foreign sources of law, including international law, should have no role in
the shaping of judicial determinations of domestic law.37 At the opposite
extreme, some scholars have argued that foreign sources should enjoy a
privileged status, in the sense that their “otherness” itself strengthens the
case for their respectful assimilation.38 I believe that both these claims
display a lack of appreciation of the multiple functions of precedent and
authority in the common law process.

A judge might look to outside experiences for various reasons. On
occasion, local law itself refers to foreign law, whether due to conven-
tional choice-of-law rules or the application of a doctrine that involves
some comparative assessment (such as the forum non conveniens doctrine
used to dismiss lawsuits that would benefit from being brought in another
jurisdiction). Alternatively, judges might seek evidence of the instrumen-
tal effects of a particular rule and look at the experience of other juris-
dictions as an empirical test. Similarly, judges might look to other sources
to expand their conceptual apparatus. Finally, a judge might apply for-
eign law out of an independent sense of obligation. Unless one wishes to
defend judicial ignorance and narrow-mindedness, only the last function
raises any difficulties.

On the one hand, those who attack any use of foreign or international
law in the common law process are guilty of confusing these different
functions and thereby weaken the force of their arguments. On the other
hand, those who argue for privileging this category of law have tended to
collapse these functions exactly because some seem obviously appealing,
thus obscuring the need to defend the more difficult one. In the United
States, neither the critics nor the apologists have sufficiently explored the
specific issues surrounding the positing of a foreign-source obligation to
apply foreign law.

37 Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815, 868 n. 4 (1988) (Scalia, J., dissenting); Stanford v.
Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361, 369 n. 1 (1989); Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 347–48 (2002) (Scalia,
J., dissenting); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 598 (2003) (Scalia, J., dissenting).

38 See Laurence R. Helfer and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Toward a Theory of Effective
Supranational Adjudication,” Yale Law Journal 107, no. 2 (1997); and Harold Hongju Koh,
“International Law as Part of Our Law,” American Journal of International Law 98, no. 1 (2004):
45–48. These scholars cite with approval the claim of a prominent appellate judge, the
former Dean of Yale Law School, that, with respect to the constitutional jurisprudence of
countries that have drawn their inspiration from the United States, “Wise parents do not
hesitate to learn from their children.” United States v. Then, 56 F.3d 464, 469 (2d Cir. 1995)
(Calabresi, J.).

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 147



One argument that I note in order to disregard it is the claim that the
privileging of foreign and international authority masks a substantive
agenda, namely the importation of bien-pensant social-democratic val-
ues.39 It may be true that some advocates of the privileging position fail
to explain why the decisions of, for example, the Strasbourg court should
count but the law and practices of non-European states do not.40 Behind
this failure may lie undefended normative preferences. However, the
more persuasive advocates of using foreign and international law acknowl-
edge the point and mount a general defense of their position.41 It is this
general defense that I wish to address.

The basic argument for giving authoritative effect to international law
rests on conformity and safety in numbers. A judicial consensus that
crosses national boundaries, so the argument goes, matters more than a
split of legal authority. To maximize the deference judges qua judges get
from society, they should stick together. Thus, a foreign decision — say, the
conclusion by the Strasbourg court that the European Convention on
Human Rights contains an implicit ban on the criminalization of sodomy —
should influence the Supreme Court of the United States in deciding
whether the U.S. fundamental law similarly has an unstated but effective
limit on governmental power. Moreover, this influence should rest on
grounds other than instrumental observations (civilization as we know it
did not come to an end in Europe after the Strasbourg court reached its
judgment) or conceptual innovation (the particular arguments used to
construct an implicit rule from general language in a fundamental text).42

Rather, other courts should follow the Strasbourg court because doing so
enhances their authority as well as that of the European body.43

How does this accretion of authority work? First, the appearance of
consensus serves as a secondary source of persuasion. Doubters will be
more reluctant to challenge widely held beliefs than those that are openly
contested. Second, persons may feel some social pull toward conformity
and away from deviance. Cooperation across courts thus builds social
pressure.

Accepting that this dynamic exists and can bolster judicial authority,
one can still question whether it should proceed unchecked. Judicial author-
ity, one might believe, does not work as an end in itself. We want to
empower judges to the extent that they will act in ways that make us

39 Jeremy Rabkin, “Is EU Policy Eroding the Sovereignty of Non-Member States?” Chicago
Journal of International Law 1, no. 2 (2000): 273–90.

40 Roger P. Alford, “Misusing International Sources to Interpret the Constitution,” Amer-
ican Journal of International Law 98, no. 1 (2004): 64–69.

41 Helfer and Slaughter, “Toward a Theory of Effective Supranational Adjudication.”
42 For instances of the “civilization did not end” kind of argument, see Atkins v. Virginia,

536 U.S. 304, 316 n. 21 (2002); and Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 576–77 (2003).
43 Atkins v. Virginia; Lawrence v. Texas; Slaughter, “Judicial Globalization.” For a recent

instance of the Supreme Court making this kind of argument, see Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S.
(2005).

148 PAUL B. STEPHAN



better off than we would be if they did not act, but not otherwise. For
lawyers, of course, this is a hard point to acknowledge, because at least
some set of lawyers inevitably will benefit from any accretion of judicial
power. Proponents and opponents of any particular move, whether liti-
gators or judges, will grow more powerful from having their controversy
gain salience and perhaps will enjoy material rewards as well. Academics
will have more to discuss authoritatively. But if we can broaden our
horizons to consider the welfare of society, surely we must acknowledge
that judges, like other state actors, are capable of arbitrary exercises of
power that may threaten liberty.

Checking the lawmaking capacity of judges is tricky, however, because
the common law methodology constitutes a style of argument rather than
a naked assertion of raw power. Recent proposals in the U.S. Congress to
forbid judges from relying on foreign precedent strike me as silly. Judges
“rely” on precedent both when they weave it into their arguments and
when they act on the basis of their understanding of it, and only the
former can be observed. The legislation, in effect, seeks to regulate how
judges write opinions, not what they do. The gesture seems empty.

A deeper problem is categorical. Conventional common law method-
ology simply fills in gaps that legislative enactments can supersede. But
constitutional interpretation — in Europe, this means interpretation of the
Treaty of Rome and the Convention on Human Rights — operates inde-
pendently of legislative enactments. Legislatures have no authority to
direct courts on how to interpret or apply constitutions.44 As a result,
legislatures cannot override either interpretive strategies or outcomes as
to constitutional questions, even where the courts rely on international
law. To the extent that courts frame their decisions as constitutional inter-
pretation, Congress in the United States, and national parliaments in
Europe, cannot do anything about controversial decisions (involving, for
example, the rights and privileges of sexual minorities or the scope of
capital punishment) that may incorporate outside sources of authority.

Put aside the problem that, in at least some instances, judges can bring
international law into their decisions in ways that displace national leg-
islatures. Are the outcomes based on international law necessarily desir-
able? The “safety in numbers” argument has a certain appeal. Some
regularities in international practice maximize welfare independent of
their effect on judicial prestige and power. Justice Antonin Scalia, a lead-
ing opponent of the incorporation of international law into constitutional
decision making, still argues that the interpretation of international trea-
ties requires judges to take account of the understandings of the treaty
parties, including those understandings expressed by courts in other coun-

44 Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428 (2000) (statute intended to determine scope of
remedy for violations of constitutional protection against self-incrimination unconstitution-
ally infringes on judicial prerogatives).

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 149



tries.45 A more formal way of putting the point is that some legal struc-
tures have built into them the possibility of network effects, and that
efforts of judges to develop these effects can be defended without privi-
leging judicial prerogatives as such.46

In sum, two problems face any effort to limit judicial aggrandizement
based on the promotion of international solidarity. First, the legislative
process cannot plausibly regulate rhetorical moves, as distinguished from
discrete outcomes, and also cannot respond to outcomes placed on a
constitutional footing. Second, some international solidarity is good, but
separating the desirable, network-effects instances from judicial oppor-
tunism is hard. No categorical or structural approach seems to work.

Checking of international lawmaking by domestic courts thus requires
approaches that operate internally to the domestic legal culture, as opposed
to the institutional-design approaches discussed in Section III with respect
to international organs. That is to say, the judges must limit their own
actions, because limits imposed from outside seem neither reliable nor
plausible. Framed in this manner, the problem resembles that involving
constitutional development: internalization by judges of certain norms
becomes the only effective means of guarding against excesses.

Earlier I questioned whether internalized cultural norms alone can
function as checks on international tribunals such as the ICC and the
Strasbourg court. The points I raised — lack of cultural solidarity and inter-
nalized norms — do not apply to many of the domestic courts that many
scholars have asked to contribute to international lawmaking. These bod-
ies, and in particular the federal courts of the United States, operate
against a powerful background of tradition and well-developed profes-
sional identity. It is not patently inconsistent, then, to expect internalized
cultural norms to do some work in checking domestic courts, but to
expect less with regard to international tribunals.

The process of internalizing skepticism about the reliance on inter-
national authority has several dimensions. Those who select judges — in
the United States, the president and a majority of the Senate do this for
the most influential members of the judiciary — may try to predict whether
a candidate has such skepticism, although ex ante predictions of this kind
are notoriously unreliable.47 Leading figures in the judiciary — in the United
States, this means first and foremost the members of the Supreme Court —
might expound on the reasons for adopting a more skeptical posture. And

45 Olympic Airways v. Hussain, 540 U.S. 644, 659 –62 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting).
46 “Network effects” rest on the rediscovery by some economists and legal theorists of

activities that entail positive returns to scale, which is to say that increasing the level of the
activity increases the average net benefits associated with each unit of that activity. For
application of the theory to international relations, see Kal Raustiala, “The Architecture of
International Cooperation: Transgovernmental Networks and the Future of International
Law,” Virginia Journal of International Law 43, no. 1 (2002): 63–68.

47 John C. Jeffries, Jr., “In Memoriam: Lewis F. Powell, Jr.,” Harvard Law Review 112, no. 3
(1999): 597–600.

150 PAUL B. STEPHAN



those who interact publicly with the judiciary and play a role in shaping
judicial reputations, particularly members of the scholarly community,
might praise or condemn judges based on whether they display a critical
perspective toward claims of foreign authority.

The praise of skepticism runs against a certain grain in the legal acad-
emy. Legal scholarship for the most part avoids the scientific method,
which means that the expounding of nonfalsifiable claims incurs no costs.
Partly for this reason, creativity and shock value count for more than
usefulness. A predictable egotism and self-regard leads, if not ineluctably
then frequently, to ambitious claims that require the suspension of skep-
ticism. The current popularity for judicial participation in international
lawmaking reflects these factors at least to some extent.

Academia contains other forces, however, that may push the debate in
another direction. Normal competitive pressures ensure that no conven-
tional wisdom remains unchallenged for long, and an increase in the
salience of a position tends to lead to greater critical scrutiny. In the last
few years, we have seen in the United States the beginning of a serious
debate about the legitimacy and value of the incorporation of inter-
national law into domestic common law. Although some of the antago-
nists have held on to reductive and absolute positions, new scholarship
has taken a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to the problem. In
particular, the image of international law as a monolithic authority, as
well as the portrayal of domestic incorporation as an all-or-nothing prop-
osition, has been superseded by analytically rich accounts that recognize
multiple dimensions of the problem.48

One consequence of the increasing sophistication of the debate is the
subversion of arguments based on the authority, as distinguished from
the usefulness, of international law. To be sure, some scholars insist dog-
gedly on the existence of a clear line of practice in which domestic courts
consistently over the centuries have used a monolithic body of “inter-
national law” to shape municipal norms.49 But a growing consensus about
the complexity of the issue lightens this purported historical burden by
demonstrating that earlier judicial practices, far from being canonical
evidence of a general pattern, represent discrete responses to distinguish-
able problems. This necessary first step makes possible a shift in the terms
of debate. We now can make normative judgments about the products of

48 See T. Alexander Aleinikoff, “International Law, Sovereignty, and American Constitu-
tionalism: Reflections on the Customary International Law Debate,” American Journal of
International Law 98, no. 1 (2004); and Ernest A. Young, “Sorting Out the Debate over
Customary International Law,” Virginia Journal of International Law 42, no. 2 (2002). Both
these recent works owe a substantial conceptual debt to A. M. Weisburd, “State Courts,
Federal Courts, and International Cases,” Yale Journal of International Law 10, no. 1 (1995).

49 Koh, “International Law as Part of Our Law”; Gerald L. Neuman, “The Uses of Inter-
national Law in Constitutional Interpretation,” American Journal of International Law 98, no. 1
(2004).

PROCESS VALUES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUSTICE 151



the common law process freed from false constraints based on authori-
tarian claims.50

A move away from obligatory reliance on international law in favor of
more nuanced and consequentialist discussions may have a salutary effect
on the common law process. Judges (much like all people) sometimes
seek to avoid the pain associated with difficult decisions by depicting
themselves as compelled to reach a result. Arguments based on authority
invite the actor to disregard the actor’s intuitions about the action’s con-
sequences or the extent to which it will displease relevant audiences.
Restricting the domain of authority increases the likelihood that the actor
will take into account the implications of the action. So cautioned, the
actor — in this case, common law judges — may hesitate more often before
encroaching on liberty.

V. Conclusion

It may seem odd to think of international law as a potential threat to
liberty, and hence to justice. Certainly its proponents see it as a beacon of
hope, a means of civilizing the too violent and cruel tendencies of inter-
national politics and promoting humane values. I recognize these aspi-
rations, but note that the last century was littered with regimes that
attracted adherents by their noble ideals but that too often became instru-
ments of awful crimes.51 The manifest good faith and eloquence of those
who wish to broaden the scope of international law is not itself sufficient
to foreclose an inquiry into the possibility of this threat.

The threat I describe is largely potential. Most specialists would argue
that the central problem with international law is its inefficacy, not its
power. I argue that this rejoinder is backward looking. The trend over the
last twenty years involves the accretion of authority by international
institutions, and more frequent and more significant invocations of inter-
national law by national lawmakers. I do not argue that either develop-
ment necessarily is a bad thing. I do argue that the time for critical
analysis of these trends is now.

Law, University of Virginia

50 Ullonoa Flores v. S. Peru Copper Corp., 343 F.3d 140, 170–71 (2d Cir. 2003) (rejecting
argument that claims of international law experts constitute an independent source for
determining the law of the United States); United States v. Yousef, 327 F.3d 56, 74 and n. 35
(2d Cir. 2003) (same).

51 Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek,
and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Mark
Kramer, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).

152 PAUL B. STEPHAN