This chapter examines the institutional context of the Court. It focuses first on the Court’s function as a court, i.e. as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. It then considers the Court’s relations with States, as an international court. Finally, he considers the Court’s institutional grounding as an organ of the United Nations, and examines its relationship with the United Nations. Professor Ginsburg argues that there is a gap between the Court’s formal institutional structures and its actual operation in practice, and emphasises in particular the way in which the Court has taken a central role in the development of international law.

This chapter examines the link between the legitimacy of international commercial courts and the ethics of their judges. It starts from the premise that the professional ethics of judges are not only a matter of their personal and professional integrity. Instead, the chapter argues, the international and cross-cultural context of international commercial courts may affect what is considered appropriate for a judge. To demonstrate this argument, the chapter analyses ethical rules regarding ex parte communication between judges and parties or their lawyers, and the cultural differences among legal systems. It concludes by calling on the host States to commit energy and resources to develop separate codes of conduct for the judges presiding in the international commercial courts that they have created.

This chapter considers why, in light of globalisation, it is necessary to move beyond the domestic sphere to consider the role of international mechanisms when seeking to achieve the twin goals of enhancing corporate decision-making surrounding fundamental rights and developing the substantive content of corporate obligations. Where existing mechanisms are not silent concerning those obligations, they either tend to read off corporate obligations directly from state obligations or to conflate impacts with violations. Most current structures are ‘soft’ and thus have limited authority to issue guidance. I make proposals for reforms to existing initiatives – including the United Nations Guiding Principles - and for establishing new institutional mechanisms that would be capable of providing relatively authoritative guidance in relation to corporate obligations. The multi-factoral model is proposed as a basis for structuring the reasoning of those mechanisms around and deepening our understanding of those obligations.

Although in the last decade an increasing number of studies have tried to deepen the understanding of judicial-decision making and generally the working of courts, there is still a substantial theoretical and empirical gap to be investigated. The present research attempts to advance the understanding of judicial decision-making in the rarely investigated field of international courts’. The international setting, representing the intersection of several national politics’ agendas, supplies results even more obscure to be interpreted than national courts.

The main research question raised is whether the usual theoretical pillars guiding damages awarding in judicial decision-making still applies herewith or whether a different approach should be adopted for international courts and specifically for the European Court of Human Rights the subject matter of the current study, in which for example the defendant is very often states rather than individuals. The empirical investigation shows patterns and regularities that might offer a reasonable explanation on how the international court decides and what is the likely meaning of the peculiar damages awarding scheme that seems mainly to go in the direction of performing an expressive function.