The New Terrain of International Law
This chapter explains the book's threefold goal. First, it reveals a paradigm change in creating and using international courts (ICs), leading to the creation of the new international judicial architecture. Second, the book conceptualizes how new-style ICs affect domestic and international politics across countries, courts, cases, and issues. An international court's political influence comes from its authority to say what the law means for the case at hand, its jurisdiction to name violations of international law, and its ability to specify remedies that follow from international legal violations. Finally, the book aims to create nonutopian and thus more realistic expectations for ICs. This research builds on theories developed in the study of domestic courts and uses the presence of similarly designed ICs, of cross-time design changes, and variations in the influence of the same ICs across countries.