Cornell International Law Journal: Vol. 50 : No. 3 , Article 5.This study seeks to clarify the importance, current and potential, of the use of comity by international courts and tribunals. Our findings support the idea that comity might be an emerging principle of procedural law, though agreement on its exact meaning— or unequivocal choices among its many connotations— still tends to be uncommon. We submit that, as long as other solutions are not in place, the principle can be successfully employed to assist international courts and tribunals in mediating jurisdictional conflicts between themselves by balancing coordination efforts and the demands of justice in the individual cases.Comity may serve as a meta-principle of coordination between international judicial bodies, to be employed in the pursuit of the common interest to an efficient and fair system of international dispute settlement. There are strong reasons militating in favour of this proposition: international tribunals, by and large, possess the powers necessary to exercise it; international judges and arbitrators know how to use it; and its long history of applications at the domestic level suggests that it can be employed successfully for a variety of purposes.We also submit the hunch that comity may most likely be employed as a central principle for further aspects of the coordination of international adjudication, for instance informing the sound use of analogical reasoning and precedent-borrowing process. Further study will be required to assess the potential of comity in this context. We have, so far, restricted ourselves to a simpler and more crucial task, seeking to resituate the principle of comity as one on which to rely for the resolution of different types of conflicts between international jurisdictions, and to question the traditional assumption that it is just an unhelpful complication: its history and rediscovery suggest otherwise.

How do international adjudicators use precedent? This question has been addressed several times in the literature, but doctrinal accounts have generally failed to consider the aggregate dimension of the phenomenon. This article seeks to provide an alternative outlook by offering a large-scale computational analysis of the body of jurisprudence of three international fora (the ICJ, the WTO Appellate Body and investment arbitration tribunals) and comparing their citation patterns with those of other judicial bodies—national and international. Building on a very large dataset (comprising over 200,000 citations), it employs network analysis tools to measure the evolution of international law citation networks. It then unpacks this emerging complexity by considering what, in a precedent, holds ‘citing value’, highlighting the expansion of the range of precedential resources as well as the consecration of established authorities. Finally, the article considers three examples of computational analysis of citations to precedent in order to better gauge the level of engagement with the past.

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This article considers the approach to the res judicata principle taken by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and, specifically, its application in its 2016 judgment on preliminary objections in the latest dispute between Nicaragua and Colombia. The judgment joins the small number of ICJ decisions in which the Court was evenly split, an altogether rare situation, which, at the time of the decision, had not occurred since the Nuclear Weapons Avisory Opinion. Intriguingly, such a fracture seems to have been prompted by differences over the operation of a procedural principle the understanding of which is comparatively uncontroversial. Upon closer analysis, however, the disagreement reveals that more significant questions were at stake, with members of the minority issuing a vocal joint dissent and several individual declarations. This study will move in three parts: first, it will provide an overview of the nature and purpose of the principle of res judicata, its application in international adjudication, and its use by the ICJ; second, it will analyse the Court’s reading of the principle in the case at issue; third, it will expose the broader implications of one such approach for the role and authority of the World Court and the international judiciary.

In recent years, various actors—states, judges and commentators alike—have taken issue with the way international adjudicators have approached precedent. Criticism has been levelled, in particular, to the phenomenon of ‘obiter dicta’ (observations that, though not necessary for the decision, are nonetheless included in it), which have been found to amount to a symptom of bad decision-making or, from the perspective of the adjudicator using them, bad precedent following. This article addresses this debate by resituating the issue within a more grounded discussion of the theory of precedent in international adjudication, providing an in-depth theoretical and empirical analysis of the practice, and seeks to frame it within in the broader phenomenon of ‘textualization’. By doing so, it strives to clarify the use, authority and ultimate function of obiter dicta, as well as of precedent in general, in international adjudication.