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Adjudicating In Anarchy: An Expressive Theory Of International Dispute Resolution, Tom Ginsburg, Richard H. Mcadams

William & Mary Law Review

Frequent compliance with the adjudicative decisions of international institutions, such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), is puzzling because these institutions do not have the power domestic courts possess to impose sanctions. This Article uses game theory to explain the power of international adjudication via a set of expressive theories, showing how law can be effective without sanctions. When two parties disagree about conventions that arise in recurrent situations involving coordination, such as a convention of deferring to territorial claims of first possessors, the pronouncements of third-party legal decision makers-adjudicators--can influence their behavior in two ways. First, adjudicative expression …