IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/intorg/v64y2010i04p563-592_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Nature or Nurture? Judicial Lawmaking in the European Court of Justice and the Andean Tribunal of Justice

Author

Listed:
  • Alter, Karen J.
  • Helfer, Laurence R.

Abstract

Are international courts power-seeking by nature, expanding the reach and scope of international rules and the courts' authority where permissive conditions allow? Or, does expansionist lawmaking require special nurturing? We investigate the relative influences of nature versus nurture by comparing expansionist lawmaking in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ), the ECJ's jurisdictional cousin and the third most active international court. We argue that international judges are more likely to become expansionist lawmakers where they are supported by substate interlocutors and compliance constituencies, including government officials, advocacy networks, national judges, and administrative agencies. This comparison of two structurally identical international courts calls into question prevailing explanations of ECJ lawmaking, and it suggests that prevailing scholarship puts too much emphasis on the self-interested power-seeking of judges, the importance of institutional design features, and the preferences of governments to explain lawmaking by international courts.

Suggested Citation

  • Alter, Karen J. & Helfer, Laurence R., 2010. "Nature or Nurture? Judicial Lawmaking in the European Court of Justice and the Andean Tribunal of Justice," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 64(4), pages 563-592, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:intorg:v:64:y:2010:i:04:p:563-592_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0020818310000238/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Liesbet Hooghe & Gary Marks, 2015. "Delegation and pooling in international organizations," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 10(3), pages 305-328, September.
    2. Giuseppe Zaccaria, 2022. "You’re Fired! International Courts, Re‐contracting, and the WTO Appellate Body during the Trump Presidency," Global Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 13(3), pages 322-333, June.
    3. Arthur Dyevre & Nicolas Lampach, 2021. "Issue attention on international courts: Evidence from the European Court of Justice," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 16(4), pages 793-815, October.
    4. Höpner, Martin & Schäfer, Armin, 2012. "Integration among unequals: How the heterogeneity of European varieties of capitalism shapes the social and democratic potential of the EU," MPIfG Discussion Paper 12/5, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    5. Höpner, Martin, 2014. "Wie der Europäische Gerichtshof und die Kommission Liberalisierung durchsetzen: Befunde aus der MPIfG-Forschungsgruppe zur Politischen Ökonomie der europäischen Integration," MPIfG Discussion Paper 14/8, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    6. Arthur Dyevre, 2017. "Domestic judicial defiance and the authority of international legal regimes," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 453-481, December.
    7. Todd Allee & Manfred Elsig, 2016. "Why do some international institutions contain strong dispute settlement provisions? New evidence from preferential trade agreements," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 89-120, March.
    8. William Phelan, 2015. "Enforcement and Escape in the Andean Community: Why the Andean Community of Nations is Not a Replica of the European Union," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(4), pages 840-856, July.
    9. Karen Alter, 2016. "William Phelen. 2015. In place of inter-state retaliation: The European Union’s rejection of WTO-style trade sanctions (Oxford: Oxford University Press)," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 145-149, March.
    10. Goertz, Gary & Powers, Kathy, 2014. "Regional governance: The evolution of a new institutional form," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Global Governance SP IV 2014-106, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    11. Leslie Johns, 2014. "Depth versus rigidity in the design of international trade agreements," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 26(3), pages 468-495, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:intorg:v:64:y:2010:i:04:p:563-592_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/ino .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.