Description: 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.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes: 'Experiments in International Adjudication is a treasure. Recovering successful and failed efforts at international adjudication in the nineteenth and twentieth century, spanning Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, a stellar group of scholars considers why history does and does not remember or build on early efforts at international adjudication. Beyond explicating little known international adjudication experiments, we learn of the forces working for and against generalizing these experiments so as to lay the groundwork for constructing an international judiciary capable of resolving trans-border disputes and generating state responsibility and accountability to international law.' Karen J. Alter, Northwestern University and iCourts