This introduction to Section 5 of the volume on judicial manuals and handbooks discusses the portrayal of Islamic legal judgeship (qaḍāʾ) in existing scholarship and comments on the transformation of the institution in the modern period with the rise of the nation-state and the tendency toward the codification of law, as well as including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.

The introduction makes a case for returning to the topic of Boccaccio’s realism through the lens of law and rhetoric. Boccaccio’s Decameron is not just realistic from a stylistic perspective, a mark of the authors modernity. Rather, the work is itself a critical examination of the uses and abuses of realism. This examination of everyday, social mimesis occurs most trenchantly in the Decameron’s numerous trial scenes. Accordingly, this introduction argues that we should shift focus from Boccaccio the expert canonist to Boccaccio the astute observer of procedural law. It argues, further, that that the difference between Dante’s and Boccaccio’s realism can be seen as a legal-procedural difference. Dante prefers in inquisitorial poetics aimed at uncovering hidden truths while Boccaccio’s realism is dialectical and accusatorial.

This introduction reviews scholarship on international legal fragmentation, lays out a framework for understanding international judicial cross-fertilization, and previews the contributions and their findings. Existing scholarship on international legal fragmentation, we argue, has moved through three phases over the past several decades. In the first, legal scholars and practitioners reacted with alarm to the judicial proliferation of the post–Cold War years, which they feared would create overlapping jurisdiction and conflicting interpretations of law. Following this period, the new century saw the pendulum swing toward a second, more optimistic picture in which international courts addressed fragmentation through “management” techniques, producing unity in international law. We can detect the opening salvos of a third wave, as skeptics have questioned the management account, pointing to the mixed motives of international judges and the limits of cross-fertilization. In this volume, we build on the existing literature by theorizing the actors of cross-fertilization and their motives, and by distinguishing between procedural and substantive cross-fertilization.

Interstate dispute settlement authorities (IDSAs) require administration by means of so-called registries or secretariats. These entities are entrusted with tasks that help the respective IDSA in discharging its function as a judiciary. A comparative analysis of selected IDSAs’ Statutes and Rules of Procedure reveals that the tasks assigned to registries or secretariats are not uniform for all IDSAs. There rather exist two different modes of work, with one being exclusively administrative and the other being supplementary consultative. This chapter sheds light on the origins of the consultative mode of work in the IDSAs’ Statutes and Rules of Procedure. It is argued that adjudication through dispute settlement requires legal and non-legal information to be processed by some means of information management within the course of court proceedings. Pre-judicial proceedings encompass joint information management by the disputing parties before adjudication takes place. In this case, IDSAs’ registries’ and secretariats’ statutory rules prescribe only an administrative mode of work. In contrast, for IDSAs in which pre-judicial proceedings are not foreseen, information management needs to take place in the course of court proceedings and hence is conducted by the respective judiciary. This information management is carried out in cooperation with their secretariats or registries. In this case, IDSAs’ registries’ or secretariats’ statutory rules prescribe a consultative mode of work. A correlation between the existence of pre-judicial proceedings and the absence of respective registries’ or secretariats’ consultative modes of work is deduced from a comparison of eight different IDSAs. In conclusion, positive aspects of joint information management by the disputing parties are highlighted and best-practice examples for the integration of joint information management by disputing parties for ISDAs which do not foresee pre-judicial proceedings are indicated.