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It is easy to mock the great expectations of late 19th- and early 20th-century Americans about the promise of international law. With hindsight, it is known that between 1914 and 1945, ‘civilized’ Europe and America were engulfed in two bloody world wars killing tens of millions, and that since 1945, all the world's peoples have been threatened by possible annihilation by nuclear weapons and other terrors. Such horrors were undreamt of a hundred years ago. What Americans knew at the end of the 19th century was their own past, a much more encouraging history. This chapter begins with the highpoint of 19th-century American international law idealism: the Alabama arbitration of 1872. It then looks to the International Law Association, established in 1873, and to the religious believers in international law of the period, and asks to what extent their belief in the progress of international law was justified.

At the Paris Peace Conference, liberal internationalists maintained that the international system could be regulated by a new League of Nations and an international court to settle political disputes. This was not an international criminal court, however. Later, different European jurists adopted that project for liberal and conservative purposes. In 1920 Baron Edouard Descamps proposed a non-permanent international criminal court with jurisdiction over aggressive war and war crimes, but also over “crimes against the international order,” meaning socialist revolution. Romanian jurist Vespasien V. Pella wanted to create an international criminal court to prevent wars of aggression, as well as create a new tool that would allow states to protect themselves against transnational crime, revolutionary socialism, and terrorism. The movement to build the new field of international criminal law in the 1920s had very little success because it was out of step with other legal and political developments in the League and could not resolve jurisdictional conflicts among states. By 1929, criminological jurists had helped write an anti-counterfeiting convention, but they needed a new project that would attract state officials to their grand vision of creating an international legal system based on criminal laws. The rise of new forms of terrorism provided that opportunity.

In the 1950s, professional bodies such as the International Law Association (ILA) sought to formulate universal legal rules amidst the complexities of decolonization, technological utopias, and the global Cold War. This chapter analyses the ILA’s involvement in a water rights dispute between India and Pakistan. Discussions within the ‘divisible college’ of the ILA shaped the way in which these post-colonial nations used both domestic and imported legal expertise to define sovereignty autonomously and, by extension, to destabilize the consensus within the international legal community on the extent to which international law could be regarded as settled. Four jurists of the ILA Rivers Committee feature in this investigation: S. M. Sikri, a future Chief Justice of India; Manzur Qadir, Senior Advocate and future Foreign minister of Pakistan; and two Western advisers to the governments of India and Pakistan respectively, the German scholar Friedrich Berber and the US government official John Laylin.

This chapter explores the feasibility of professionalization through the articulation of common ethical standards for counsel. Through analysis of the nascent efforts in professional organizations such as the International Law Association, International Bar Association, and Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe to codify such standards, it assesses the utility of the exercise and the process by which these principles can be applied in practice. It considers the legal powers (eg the ‘inherent jurisdiction’ or ‘inherent powers’ of international courts) and practical ability of international judges to regulate counsel as well as the issues that have arisen in the nascent process of articulating common ethical standards in professional organizations, including the ILA Hague Principles on Ethical Standards for Counsel Appearing before International Courts and Tribunals. Moreover, the chapter examines the jurisprudence of international courts and tribunals concerning regulatory powers for counsel and the legal and practical problems associated with regulation of counsel by the international judiciary.

This chapter provides an overview of confidentiality, one of the advantages of arbitration. It first explains the duty of confidentiality before turning to the provisions of the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010 that are relevant to confidential information and the breach of the confidentiality duty. It then considers the exceptions to which the duty of confidentiality is subject under r 26(1) of the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010. It also presents court cases relevant to confidentiality in international arbitration, including those from England, Singapore, Bermuda, Australia, Sweden, and the United States. Finally, it discusses the International Law Association's report which surveyed the sources of confidentiality and covered the UNCITRAL Model Law, thirty national jurisdictions and twenty-two international commercial arbitration institutions.

This chapter traces the history of efforts to domesticate international atrocity law, which provides initial plausibility for the book’s central argument. The chapter locates the origins of atrocity laws in the decades prior to World War II with a community of influential European criminal law scholars, most of whom were leaders of the International Association of Penal Law (AIDP). Following the war, some of these experts helped draft the first international atrocity law treaties, and the enforcement regimes they designed relied on national enforcement through domestic legislation. Four phases of atrocity law adoption then followed. In the first phase (1945–1957), the adoption of atrocity laws was driven mostly by principled norm entrepreneurs who were actively committed to the advancement of an international criminal law regime. In the second phase (1957–1985), professionalization and emulation became central drivers of domestic atrocity criminalization. As national governments all over the world drafted new criminal codes, transnational professional influences conditioned technocratic drafters to see atrocity criminalization as important for a modern criminal code. In the third phase (1985–1998), a new wave of domestic and international attempts to prosecute government officials for past atrocities, coupled with a resurgence of foreign technical legal assistance, helped foster the conditions that made atrocity criminalization salient beyond a specialized community of professional criminal law experts. Finally, in the current phase (1998–present), international civil society groups, inspired by the creation of the International Criminal Court, have undertaken concerted public advocacy efforts to promote the domestication of atrocity law.