After seven years, this is our last ‘In This Issue’. We are signing off with a bumper issue full of reviews in different shapes and sizes.
Two review essays offer in-depth engagement with foundational questions. Fuad Zarbiyev reflects on Alain Pellet’s 2018 Hague Academy General Course, now published in book form. Pellet’s vision of the ‘elusive theory of reality’ (l’introuvable théorie de la réalité) in international law leaves Zarbiyev puzzled at times, as its biases and limitations seem so striking. But he ends on a ‘sentimental’ note, recognizing his secret desire that Alain Pellet, as the ‘Père Fouettard’ of international law with a long record of ‘dispensing beatings to “naughty” colleagues … would come back and restore some order in the discipline’.
Jed Odermatt reimagines international law teaching in his essay, reviewing four books all published in 2024 on the topic: Folúkẹ́ I. Adébísí, Suhraiya Jivraj, and Ntina Tzouvala’s Decolonisation, Anti-Racism, and Legal Pedagogy Strategies, Successes, and Challenges, Paul F. Diehl and Charlotte Ku’s Teaching International Law, Jean-Pierre Gauci and Barrie Sander’s Teaching International Law: Reflections on Pedagogical Practice in Context and Peter Hilpold and Giuseppe Nesi’s Teaching International Law. Odermatt argues that ‘international law teaching today requires more than simply introducing students to fundamental concepts, it demands equipping students with the tools to critically engage with the international legal system’.
The two essays are followed by five regular reviews. The reviews reflect how pervasively international courts and tribunals (of specialist or generalist vocation) shape our discipline.
We begin with Ergün Cakal’s review of Between Forbearance and Audacity: The European Court of Human Rights and the Norm against Torture, by Ezgi Yildiz. Cakal finds this book an ‘unparalleled contribution’ to scholarship and a ‘fresh’ take on how the norm against torture has developed in Europe. From human rights courts to investor-state dispute settlement, Güneş Ünüvar looks at how the concept of coherence has been used in arbitral tribunals in his review of Manifestations of Coherence and Investor-State Arbitration. Engaging with Charalampos Giannakopoulos’ argument and the idea of coherence (and what it is not: consistency, correctness, and comprehensiveness), Ünüvar finds this ‘a brilliant piece of scholarship’. We next visit international criminal proceedings with Sophie Rigney’s Fairness and Rights in International Criminal Procedure, where the idea of coherence makes an appearance again. Anni Pues finds Rigney’s argument for developing a coherent law of international criminal procedure ‘compelling’, although she would have liked to have seen more discussion on the rights of victims and witnesses. We travel back in time with Kristen Sellars in her review of Gary J. Bass’ Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia. Sellars argues that by paying attention to the trial as a ‘legal event’, we can better understand the work that legal mechanisms do in creating power relations: in this case, how the prosecution’s construction of the case transformed their countries’ participation in the conflict into a ‘more flattering narrative’ of a just war conducted by ‘peace-loving peoples’. The fifth regular review takes us back to the core. Eran Sthoeger reviews the Cambridge Companion to the International Court of Justice, edited by Carlos Esposito and Kate Parlett: a volume that, in the view of Sthoeger, illustrates the centrality of the Court (whose ‘views … on any question of international law are integral to any serious legal analysis’) to the legal discourse, but invites further reflection on ‘whether the quality of the Court’s legal analysis justifies the role it has been given by the international legal community over time’.
Finally, this issue completes our symposium on The Hague Academy’s centenary, which has spanned the last four issues of the Journal. In our short prologue, published in issue 35:2 (2024), we had expressed our hope for a ‘mosaic’ of short reflections that would open up diverse avenues for engaging with the Academy’s work. Four issues on, we end on a fittingly ‘mosaical’ note. The pieces included in this fourth instalment of the symposium interrogate the Academy and its outputs from feminist (Juliana Santos de Carvalho), postcolonialist (Sué González Hauck) and empirical (Niccolò Ridi and Thomas Schultz) perspectives. They highlight the work of two Hague stalwarts, René-Jean Dupuy (Valentina Vadi) and André Mandelstam (León Castellanos-Jankiewicz and Momchil Milanov). And they emphasize links between the Academy and its neighbour, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (Vladyslav Lanovoy). We would like to thank all the reviewers who helped us reflect on The Hague Academy’s centenary.
*****
Over the course of the past seven years, we have had the opportunity to see just under 200 contributions through to publication, covering much ground, from ICJ counterclaims to Australia’s offshore detention system. Nothing is ever perfect, and not all of our ideas have proved feasible. But we sign off with gratitude and three big ‘thank yous’: to the EJIL editors-in-chief, Joseph Weiler and Sarah Nouwen, for taking the Book Review section seriously and giving it much space in the pages of the Journal; to Anny Bremner, EJIL’s managing editor, who has held it all together; and to well over one hundred contributors, whose reviews show that books matter a great deal (and are still read carefully). We look forward to seeing the EJIL Review section evolve, as Anne Lagerwall and Doreen Lustig take charge, and wish them all the best.
