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Abstract:
In its first years of operation, both the caseload and global role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have steadily increased. The Court owes much of its success to a coalition of states that has championed a strong, independent judiciary to try heinous international crimes. These states have repeatedly clashed with the United States over a number of issues involving the ICC’s jurisdiction. This article examines the pro-ICC coalition and its strategies during these disputes. It argues that the coalition’s success stems from the make-up of its membership, which endows it with varied sources of power and tempers its principled positions with an understanding of the political realities of the international order. The ICC coalition also serves as a case study of the power politics behind the formation of international law. While international law continues to be forged under the forces of realpolitik, this coalition’s success indicates that power-forged international law does not have to be the handmaiden of the most powerful states.

Abstract:
In foreign affairs law, many federal policies increase national security at the expense of national wealth, and vice versa. Courts have struggled to find a suitable framework for adjudicating cases arising out of such policy decisions. In the recent case United States v. Eurodif S.A., the Court abandoned its previous assumptions about security-wealth cases, relying instead on the Chevron framework commonly used in administrative law. This Note outlines the shift to Chevron and the relative merits of it vis-à-vis older frameworks for security-wealth cases. It concludes Chevron represents a profound change in the Court’s assumptions about international relations and predicts that this framework, if continued, will have a positive effect on foreign policymaking.

Abstract:
As the International Criminal Court (ICC) has emerged and matured, many states have lobbied to install the Court as the international community’s primary judicial organ for serious international violations of human dignity. Other nations, most notably the United States, have proposed alternative forums to oversee cases involving such atrocities. As regime theorists of International Relations (IR) have previously noted, multiple equilibria points present a problem for interstate cooperation and can lead to protracted disputes over the most suitable outcome.

This paper studies the determinative forces and strategies applied in recent disputes between the United States and allies of the ICC, focusing particularly on the period between the Court’s inception at Rome in 1998 through the Security Council’s 2005 referral of Darfur, Sudan to the ICC. This analysis confirms the central role of traditional 'hard power' sources and security interests in shaping the institutional form of the ICC. What is overlooked, however, is that the resulting realpolitik behind the ICC was as much the result of the strategies employed by the coalition of states supporting the ICC as it was the consequence of US objections. This paper proposes a model explaining the growth of the ICC coalition during the first years of its operation, and the resulting effect it had in shifting the relative power distribution between the US and ICC supporters. While this paper does not discount the normative forces at play in shaping the Court, it emphasizes that realpolitik is certainly not gone from the Court, and it’s not just the Americans’ fault.

International Criminal Court, Pareto Frontier, International Relations, Regime Theory