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This chapter discusses the potential for jurisdictional overlap between judicial and quasi-judicial bodies belonging to different categories of courts and tribunals, and between bodies belonging to the same category. It highlights the infrequent occasions where direct or indirect conflict of jurisdictions has actually taken place. Finally, the chapter assesses the probabilities for the occurrence of future jurisdictional conflicts in the light of anticipated trends in the work of competing international courts and tribunals.

What factors exacerbated witch-trials in Poland, and what factors tended to limit the number of trials? This chapter shows that the weak, decentralized Polish courts resulted in relatively few trials but in a high rate of execution. Court procedure remained largely accusatory, and the expenses of a trial were considerable. By the same token, once an accuser, usually a nobleman, agreed to fund a trial, he expected and usually got a guilty verdict and a capital sentence. Many town courts sent magistrates to a village to try witches in situ (a practice called deputation): such trials had an especially high execution rate. But jurisdictional conflicts kept the feudal subjects of other noblemen safe from trial, and prevented chain-reaction trials.

There are two opposite ways of conceiving the relationship between law and fundamental rights in a way that makes jurisdictional conflicts manageable. Both ways are monistic, although in a completely different way: one posits the superiority of fundamental rights as moral principles over the law (Moralism). The other claims that fundamental rights should be treated as any other rule, only encapsulating very important interests by way of stipulation (Positivism). Moralism relies on value monism, which maintains that any system of values—including fundamental rights—can be presented as a reduction to the one overarching value that makes the whole morally coherent. Positivism relies instead on a formal understanding of law as a system of rules which are produced, applied, and interpreted according to one single master rule which give unity to the overall framework—what we could call legal monism. Under both these monist views, jurisdictional conflicts are only apparent. Value monism suggests that institutions ought to interpret rights in a coherent and harmonious way. Legal monism, on the other hand, suggests that an appropriately broad view of legal systems would bring about doctrinal unity. This chapter argues that the legal monistic reading is preferable because it is more transparent, more predictable, and mirrors closely the reality of the developing relationship between the European Union and the Council of Europe.

What alternatives to global democracy are there? Chapter 6 proposes institutional pluralism as one candidate for imagining the structure of international institutions. It argues that we should support, on reflection, a system of institutional pluralism based on authority distributed among many nodes, on experimentation with institutional design, and on gradualism in the construction of supra-state authority. What is crucial to institutional pluralism is the absence of a central agency or a hierarchy of subordinated agencies that perform all the functions of international cooperation and, in effect, hold a coercive monopoly on power. Drawing on international law, the chapter addresses conceptual worries related to pluralist institutional orders, such as a lack of consistency of the rules, a lack of institutional coherence, and the possibility of jurisdictional conflict.

This chapter examines the adjudicatory jurisdiction over multilateral enterprises (MNE) in the U.S. and the European Union. It mentions Professor Ian Brownlie's opinion that the principle of ‘substantial or effective connection’ with forum state would be an appropriate basis for jurisdiction in cases involving MNE. The chapter suggests that jurisdictional conflicts created by the operations of MNE can be minimized by notification and consultation among states, and by the use of existing international agreements designed to minimize friction arising over assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction.

This chapter examines a neglected phenomenon that occurs in a large number of negative integration cases decided by the European Court of Justice — jurisdictional conflicts between European powers and the retained powers of Member States. It focuses on the European Court of Justice free movement cases , i.e. cases in which it interprets EU primary law, whether the four fundamental freedoms or EU citizenship provisions. Most of these cases comprise analogous formulae, whereby the Court asserts that even though the field at issue falls within Member States' powers, the latter must exercise such powers consistently with European law. It is argued that the Court uses such line of reasoning to subject cases involving very heterogeneous fields to a specific legal framework.