Experiments in International Adjudication: Historical Accounts

The history of international adjudication is all too often presented as a triumphalist narrative of normative and institutional progress that casts aside its uncomfortable memories, its darker legacies and its historical failures. In this narrative, the bulk of 'trials' and 'errors' is left in the dark, confined to oblivion or left for erudition to recall as a curiosity. Written by an interdisciplinary group of lawyers, historians and social scientists, this volume relies on the rich and largely unexplored archive of institutional and legal experimentation since the late nineteenth century to shed new light on the history of international adjudication. It combines contextual accounts of failed, or aborted, as well as of 'successful' experiments to clarify our understanding of the past and present of international adjudication.

Ignacio de la Rasilla is the Han Depei Professor of International Law at the Wuhan University Institute of International Law, China. He was educated in Spain (LL.B. from Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Switzerland (M.A. and Ph.D from The Graduate Institute, Geneva), the United States of America (LL.M. from Harvard University) and Northern Italy (Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence). Previously he served as Lecturer and, then, as Senior Lecturer in Law at Brunel University London and adjunct professor at New York University, La Pietra, Florence. He is the author of around sixty journal articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of five books on international law and its history, including In the Shadow of Vitoria: A History of International Law in Spain, 1770–1953 (2017).

Jorge E. Viñuales is the Harold Samuel Professor of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge, where he founded the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG). He is also the Chairman of the Compliance Committee of the UN-ECE/WHO-Europe Protocol on Water and Health, a member of the Panel of Arbitrators of the Shanghai International Arbitration Centre, the Director-General of the Latin American Society of International Law, and an Of Counsel with Lalive. Prior to joining Cambridge, he was the Pictet Chair of International Environmental Law at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, where he keeps a limited affiliation as Adjunct Professor of Public International Law.