Shany: Stronger Together? Legitimacy and Effectiveness of International Courts as Mutually Reinforcing or Undermining Notions

Yuval Shany (Hebrew Univ. - Law) has posted Stronger Together? Legitimacy and Effectiveness of International Courts as Mutually Reinforcing or Undermining Notions (in Legitimacy and International Courts, Nienke Grossman, Harlan Grant Cohen, Andreas Follesdal & Geir Ulfstein eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Legitimacy and effectiveness are two key conceptual frameworks for evaluating social institutions, including judicial institutions. At the international level, attaining either judicial legitimacy or judicial effectiveness is particularly challenging: international institutions typically lack both the kind of democratic legitimation possessed by domestic institutions in liberal democracies, and the strong law-enforcement facilities available at the domestic level in ‘rule of law’ states. Given these structural deficiencies, international courts may need to resort to supplementary legitimacy-enhancing and effectiveness-bolstering factors in order to perform their functions in a satisfactory manner and to realize the expectations attendant to their operations. Arguably, such legitimacy-enhancing and effectiveness-bolstering factors tend to operate in a mutually-reinforcing manner: a more legitimate international court may function more effectively, and a more effective international court may be deemed more legitimate. Still, at times, legitimacy-detracting and effectiveness-decreasing factors may operate in a mutually-undermining manner, judicial illegitimacy producing judicial ineffectiveness and vice versa. This Chapter examines the relationship between judicial legitimacy and judicial effectiveness, as applied to international courts, and explores, in particular, their mutually reinforcing or mutually undermining attributes.