
Karen J. AlterNorthwestern University | NU · Department of Political Science
Karen J. Alter
Phd
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June 1996 - June 2000
June 2001 - present
Publications
Publications (87)
There is hardly any aspect of social, political, and economic life today that is not also governed internationally. Drawing on debates around hierarchy, hegemony, and authority in international politics, this volume takes the study of the international 'beyond anarchy' a step further by establishing the concept of rule as the defining feature of or...
iCourts is a research center for international courts and international law at the Faculty of Law in Copenhagen. The purpose of this book is to show how the establishment, operation and ambitions of a research center can impact a whole field of research.
The post-Cold War era has seen an unprecedented move towards more legalization in international cooperation and a growth of third-party dispute settlement systems. WTO panels, the Appellate Body and investor-state dispute settlement cases have received increasing attention beyond the core trade and investment constituencies within governments. Scru...
This chapter discusses three credible attempts by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of three similarly situated sub-regional courts in response to politically controversial rulings. In West Africa, when the Court of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in Gambi...
The performance of international courts has traditionally been judged against criteria of compliance and effectiveness. Whilst these are clearly desirable objectives for litigants before Africa’s international courts, this book shows that we must look beyond these criteria to fully appreciate the impact of African international courts. This book de...
This article introduces a Thematic Section and theorizes the multiple ways that judicializing international relations shifts power away from national executives and legislatures toward litigants, judges, arbitrators, and other nonstate decision-makers. We identify two preconditions for judicialization to occur—(1) delegation to an adjudicatory body...
A jurist advocacy movement is a group of legal actors (jurists) who organize collectively and deploy legal tools strategically to promote a shared cause. Jurist advocacy movements have specific policy and legal goals, whether they be the promotion of originalist interpretations of a constitution, abolition of the death penalty, advocacy of same-sex...
This article provides a novel and provocative framework to assess the varied authority of international courts (ICs). We generate practicable metric that assesses de facto IC authority according to a conjunctive standard — the recognition of an obligation to comply with IC rulings, and the engagement in meaningful actions that push toward giving fu...
The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is the third most active international court and the oldest and most successful of eleven transplanted copies of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Drawing on over a decade of interviews, archival research, and case coding, Transplanting International Courts examines the ATJ’s creation, doctrinal development,...
This chapter argues that the rise in regional courts is a game changer in regionalism that stands for more than just a commitment to use legal means to resolve economic disputes; it signals a commitment to uphold specific community values. Contrary to earlier waves of regionalism, many of these courts are not primarily engaged with trade. Instead,...
This paper discusses three credible attempts by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of three similarly-situated sub-regional courts in response to politically controversial rulings. In West Africa, when the ECOWAS Court upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in the Gambia, that country’s political leaders sought to res...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication offers a comprehensive study into the development, proliferation, and functions of international adjudicative bodies. The Handbook is divided into six parts. Part 1provides an overview of the origins and evolution of international adjudicatory bodies. Part 2 analyses the orders and families of inter...
The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice (ECCJ) is an increasingly active and bold international adjudicator of human rights violations in West Africa. Since acquiring jurisdiction over human rights issues in 2005, the ECCJ has issued several path-breaking judgments, including against the Gambia for the torture of journalists, against Niger for condon...
The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS Court) is an increasingly active and bold adjudicator of human rights. Since acquiring jurisdiction over human rights complaints in 2005, the ECOWAS Court has issued numerous decisions condemning human rights violations by the member states of the Economic Commu...
This Article explores the relationship between the legitimacy of international courts (ICs) and expansive judicial lawmaking. We compare lawmaking by three regional integration courts — the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ), and the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice (ECCJ). These courts have similar...
This is the introductory chapter of my forthcoming book with the same title. International relations have long been considered outside of the domain of law. Most people presume that law is only meaningful when backed by a central enforcer. By this logic, absent a world state international law cannot meaningfully exist. International law is rising i...
The creation and increased usage of permanent international courts to deal with a broad range of issues is a relatively new phenomenon. The founding dates of international courts suggests that three critical junctures were important in the creation of the contemporary international courts: the Hague Peace conferences and with it the larger movement...
This chapter is part of an upcoming interdisciplinary volume on international law and politics. The chapter defines four judicial roles states have delegated to international courts (ICs) and documents the delegation of dispute settlement, administrative review, enforcement and constitutional review jurisdiction to ICs based on a coding of legal in...
Although there is an extensive literature on domestic legal transplants, far less is known about the transplantation of supranational judicial bodies. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is one of nearly a dozen copies of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and the third most active international court. This article considers the origins and evol...
The Sword and the Scales: The United States and International Courts and Tribunals. Edited by RomanoCesare P. R.. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 492p. $108.00 cloth, $36.99 paper. - Volume 9 Issue 4 - Karen J. Alter
The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is a copy of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and the third most active international court. This article reviews our findings based on an original coding of all ATJ preliminary rulings from 1984 to 2007, and over forty interviews in the region. We then compare Andean and European jurisprudence in three key...
This chapter is a contribution to "Balancing Wealth and Health: Global Administrative Law and the Battle over Intellectual Property and Access to Medicines in Latin America," Rochelle Dreyfuss & César Rodríguez-Garavito, eds. Part I of the chapter explains how the repeated interactions between the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) and domestic IP ag...
International enforcement courts are explicitly empowered to rule on state compliance with international law. Part I identifies the universe of permanent international courts (ICs) with delegated enforcement roles and it explains why states are increasingly consenting to robust compulsory international judicial review of state compliance. Part II f...
Europe created the model of embedded international courts (IC), where domestic judges work with international judges to interpret and apply international legal rules that are also part of national legal orders. This model has now diffused around the world. This article documents the spread of European-style ICs: there are now eleven operational cop...
This chapter explains how the end of WWII, the Cold War and the end of the Cold War have shaped the international judiciary, generating an ‘embedded' approach to international law enforcement. I continue the focus on the international judiciary as a whole, highlighting how developments in one region and domain affect developments in similar and dis...
The proponents of international courts (ICs) expect that creating formal legal institutions will help to increase respect for international law. International relations scholars question such claims, since ICs have no tools to compel state compliance. Such views are premised on the notion that states have unique preferences that ICs must satisfy in...
Most international relations approaches expect that states have unique preferences that international courts (ICs) must satisfying in order to be effective. Starting from the premise that states have within numerous conflicting preferences, I argue that ICs can act as tipping point actors, building and giving resources to compliance constituencies...
Are international courts power-seeking by nature, expanding the reach and scope of international rules and the courts’ authority where permissive conditions allow? Or, does expansionist lawmaking require special nurturing? We investigate the relative influences of nature versus nurture by comparing expansionist lawmaking in the European Court of Ju...
The most effective international legal system in the world exists in Europe. It works much like a domestic system, where violations of the law are brought to court, legal decisions are respected, and the autonomous influence of law and legal rulings extends into the political process itself. The European legal system was not always so effective at...
Neo-functionalist accounts European legal integration stress how individuals (lawyers, judges, litigants, legal scholars) pursuing their narrow self-interest through supranational means drove the establishment and penetration of the ECJ's doctrines into national legal orders. Neo-functionalist theory suggests that merely transplanting the ECJ's str...
In the European Union, national courts have been key intermediaries in helping to bolster and expand the authority of the European Court of Justice through its preliminary reference mechanism. This article analyzes the role of national judges in the Andean Community, a regional legal system whose judicial institution - the Andean Tribunal of Justic...
This article extracts from Alter's larger body of work insights on how the political and social context shapes the ECJ's political power and influence. Part I considers how the political context facilitated the constitutionalization of the European legal system. Part II considers how the political context helps determine where and when the current...
Are international courts (ICs) by nature expansionist lawmakers, expanding the reach and scope of their authority at the expense of state sovereignty when permissive conditions allow? Or are they naturally conservative, applying international law in straightforward and circumscribed ways unless environmental factors encourage them to be more expans...
Islands of Effective International Adjudication: Constructing an Intellectual Property Rule of Law in the Andean Community - Volume 103 - Laurence R. Heifer, Karen J. Alter, M. Florencia Guerzovich
The Andean Community has achieved surprising success in one part of its legal system. More than fourteen hundred rulings on intellectual property by the Andean Tribunal of Justice have helped national administrative agencies improve their decision making and resist pressure to deviate from Andean rules. This article explains the emergence of this i...
Most scholars think of courts as a single category of adjudicative bodies or triadic dispute adjudication. But courts play a variety of roles in the domestic political system. Increasingly, the roles and tasks delegated to International Courts (ICs) mimic in form and content the roles and tasks delegated to courts in liberal democracies. Thus where...
The increasing density of international regimes has contributed to the proliferation of overlap across agreements, conflicts among international obligations, and confusion regarding what international and bilateral obligations cover an issue. This symposium examines the consequences of the complex of overlapping, parallel and nested agreements for...
Most scholars think of courts as a single category of adjudicative bodies or triadic dispute resolution. But courts play a variety of roles in the domestic political system. Increasingly, the roles and tasks delegated to ICs mimic in form and content the roles and tasks delegated to courts in liberal democracies. Thus where initially international...
for their feedback. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous funding during the drafting of this paper. The usual caveat applies. 2 ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a proliferation of international institutions, as well as renewed attention to the role that forum-shopping, nested and overlapping institutions, and regim...
Trading Voices: The European Union in International Commercial Negotiations. By Sophie Meunier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 248p. $35.
One often hears that integration in Europe magnifies the political voice of European countries on the international scene. The larger size of the European Union market surely makes investment in any...
One of the main hopes of proponents of international courts is that international courts will in some way encourage greater respect for international law. In truth, we know surprisingly little about the relationship between international courts and compliance with international law. The academic literature yields few direct hypotheses, because it h...
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the first step in the process of European integration. Its founders had lofty aspirations that integration in coal and steel would spill into a larger endeavor, and early scholarly analyses suggested that coal and steel integration was spurring more fundamental political change. Looking over the fift...
The decade long trans-Atlantic banana dispute was not a traditional trade conflict stemming from antagonistic producers’ interests. Instead, this article argues that the banana dispute is one of the most complex illustrations of the legal and political difficulties created by the nesting and overlapping of international institutions and commitments...
Scholars expect International Courts (ICs) with private access and compulsory jurisdiction to be more independent and effective. This article shows a trend of creating and using ICs with compulsory jurisdiction and private access, using as evidence the founding statutes and usage rates of twenty ICs created since 1945. Analyzing where and for what...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (p. 338-353). by Karen J. Alter. Ph.D.
This book chapter is a companion paper to the Trustee article. Where the Trustee article develops a theoretical justification for why recontracting politics will not be a central feature of state-IC relations, this chapter makes the empirical case that the tools that P-A theory expects to be a source of state influence over International Courts do...
Principal-Agent (P-A) theory sees the fact of delegation as defining a relationship be-tween states (collective Principals) and international organizations (Agents) with recon-tracting threats being the predominate way states influence IOs. Developing a category of Trustee-Agents, I argue that recontracting tools will be both harder to use and less...
In 1995 the dispute resolution system of the WTO was transformed to make it more effective in enforcing WTO rules. Ironically, the improvements in the system have contributed directly to greater conflict in the WTO. How can improving a system to resolve disputes actually exacerbate conflict? This article identifies a number of conflict-enhancing co...
The legal system of the European Union (EU) offers domestic actors apowerful tool to influence national policy. European law can be drawn onby private litigants in national courts to challenge national policies.These challenges can be sent by national judges to the European Court ofJustice (ECJ), which instructs national courts to apply European la...
To what extent can the European Court of Justice (ECJ), an international court, make decisions which go against the interests of EC member states? Neo-functionalist accounts imply that because it is a legal body the ECJ has vast political autonomy from the member states, while the neo-realist accounts imply that because member states can sanction t...
Through the examination of one of the most successful cases of a European Community (EC) law litigation strategy, this article develops a general framework for understanding when and how the EC legal system will be successfully used by domestic groups to challenge national policy. The authors show how the European legal system actually shifted the...
Three ECSA members examine the interplay of domestic and international law, using the European Union as a basis for analysis. [Includes Introduction by Mark A. Pollack, series editor].
The European Court has emerged as one of the most powerful political institutions in the European Union and the most influential international court in existence. National courts are the linchpins of the European legal system, making European Court decisions enforceable and creating an independent power base for the European Court. This article exa...
Was the European Court of Justice a key actor in the “relaunching” of European integration in the 1980s? This article examines the crucial political role that was played by the Court with its Cassis de Dijon judgment in the rejuvenation EC harmonization policy and the development of the Single European Act. The authors challenge the dominant view t...
for their feedback. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous funding during the drafting of this paper. The usual caveat applies. 2 ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a proliferation of international institutions, as well as renewed attention to the role that forum-shopping, nested and overlapping institutions, and regim...
for their feedback. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous funding during the drafting of this paper. The usual caveat applies. 2 ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a proliferation of international rules, laws and institutional forms in world politics. This has triggered attention to the role that forum-shopping, neste...
The EU legal system offers a powerful means for domestic actors to influence national policy. Because the EU legal tool is so powerful, many have hypothesized that groups will use EU litigation strategies whenever there is a potential benefit. In practice, however, EU law litigation strategies are seldom used. This paper develops a framework for un...