Explores how and why the rise in international courts impacts on domestic politics on both national and international levels.

International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.

A compelling new look at the role of today's international courts In 1989, when the Cold War ended, there were six permanent international courts. Today there are more than two dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. The New Terrain of International Law charts the developments and trends in the creation and role of international courts, and explains how the delegation of authority to international judicial institutions influences global and domestic politics. The New Terrain of International Law presents an in-depth look at the scope and powers of international courts operating around the world. Focusing on dispute resolution, enforcement, administrative review, and constitutional review, Karen Alter argues that international courts alter politics by providing legal, symbolic, and leverage resources that shift the political balance in favor of domestic and international actors who prefer policies more consistent with international law objectives. International courts name violations of the law and perhaps specify remedies. Alter explains how this limited power--the power to speak the law--translates into political influence, and she considers eighteen case studies, showing how international courts change state behavior. The case studies, spanning issue areas and regions of the world, collectively elucidate the political factors that often intervene to limit whether or not international courts are invoked and whether international judges dare to demand significant changes in state practices.

What is the relationship between politics and international law? Inspired by comparative politics and socio-legal studies, this Research Handbook develops a novel framework for comparative analysis of politics and international law at different stages of governance and in different governance systems. It applies the framework in a wide range of fields—from human rights and environmental standards, to cyber conflict and intellectual property—to show how the relationship between politics and international law varies depending on the sites where it unfolds.

This dissertation asks: when do international courts promote cooperation among countries? I argue that international courts can successfully restore economic relations between disputing governments but their impact depends on domestic politics. When confronted with an adverse legal ruling from an international court, a defendant government must determine whether and when to comply. Governments are constrained by domestic institutional divisions and partisan conflict: "veto points." Countries with substantial divisions are less likely to comply because more political actors must coordinate to implement the ruling. As partisan divisions grow, government leaders are constrained by their domestic opposition and compliance becomes more difficult. The design of the international court contributes to this effect. Courts vary in their ability to sanction violations. When the court is designed to be flexible, imposing low costs for noncompliance, the impact of domestic politics is particularly pronounced. These arguments are tested with international trade disputes at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The first empirical chapter uses WTO disputes to examine the impact of domestic politics in the defendant country on compliance with adverse legal rulings. Adverse rulings require a defendant government to remove trade barriers so this chapter assesses compliance using trade flows. I build a novel data set on compliance using the method of synthetic case control and product-level time-series trade data. I infer the defendant complied if trade flows increased after the dispute, relative to estimated levels that would have occurred in the absence of the ruling. The estimates show compliance problems are both widespread and systematically linked to domestic politics. Domestic constraints---measured in terms of veto points---hinder compliance. The second empirical chapter tests my main argument on the European Court of Justice. I show that domestic political constraints in European Union countries also impact compliance with adverse legal rulings. I focus on infringement disputes over trade-related issues, instances in which European member states imposed illegal barriers to intra-European commerce. This chapter uses a hierarchical model that captures the multi-level structure of the data. By examining intra-European trade over time, I show that adverse rulings lead to a modest increase in trade but this tendency is conditional on domestic politics. Defendant governments with many veto players appear impervious to adverse rulings. The findings indicate that ECJ rulings can prompt governments to open their markets to more European commerce, but that domestic politics can obstruct this process. The third empirical chapter evaluates the effectiveness of international dispute settlement along a different dimension: the time to resolve a dispute. Because prolonged lawsuits can buy defendants time to ``cheat'' at the expense of plaintiffs and other members of the international institution, they can have deleterious effects on cooperation that are similar to noncompliance. This chapter demonstrates that WTO and ECJ lawsuits against defendants with many domestic veto points lasted longer on average, before the countries acquiesced. Moreover, the ill effect of veto players on dispute resolution has been stronger in the WTO than the ECJ. I argue that the design of the international court mediates the impact of domestic veto players on dispute duration. In sum, my dissertation shows that international courts can successfully promote economic cooperation between countries but their effectiveness hinges on domestic politics.

On August 21, 2013, chemical weapons were unleashed on the civilian population in Syria, killing another 1,400 people in a civil war that had already claimed the lives of more than 140,000. As is all too often the case, the innocent found themselves victims of a violent struggle for political power. Such events are why human rights activists have long pressed for institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and prosecute some of the world’s most severe crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. While proponents extol the creation of the ICC as a transformative victory for principles of international humanitarian law, critics have often characterized it as either irrelevant or dangerous in a world dominated by power politics. Christopher Rudolph argues in Power and Principle that both perspectives are extreme. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, he shows how the interplay between power politics and international humanitarian law have shaped the institutional development of international criminal courts from Nuremberg to the ICC. Rudolph identifies the factors that drove the creation of international criminal courts, explains the politics behind their institutional design, and investigates the behavior of the ICC. Through the development and empirical testing of several theoretical frameworks, Power and Principle helps us better understand the factors that resulted in the emergence of international criminal courts and helps us determine the broader implications of their presence in society.

International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.