So I have been. Working on this question about how international is the International Court of Justice?
And the reason I was super interested in this question is that I was reading The Late Justice Christopher,
where amongst trees gracious lecture at the American Society of International Law a couple of years ago.
And I came across this sentence that is up on the slate and I hope we can all see the slide.
And it really sort of got me thinking about the subject of what I be talking to you this afternoon, your time.
And it's about the representation in cases before the International Court of Justice.
You know, who are the lawyers who appear for developing countries for.
For what? In this presentation, I will call the nun or UCD countries.
So the outline of my presentation is is I will tell you what I did after I really got intrigued after reading Justice,
where a man trees gracious lecture had actually listened to this gracious lecture.
But at the time when I listened to him, when he gave the gracious lecture and the response, great response by Professor Nathaniel Bumb.
And this particular part of his lecture didn't stick in my mind until I read his lecture again.
So what I did over several months with a very big group of students is to undertake an empirical study that whose results I will be presenting today.
And and then tell you what some of my takeaways are.
I do want to make any strong conclusions yet, because this is a project that is ongoing.
I have tons of data. I have tons of tables. I'll not bore you with all of it,
except that I will sort of say some of the things that are really intriguing me at the moment as I continue to develop that project.
So just this where a mentor is a gracious lecture cited this study published in the Michigan General International
Law in 2001 that had examined the very question that sort of led me to my own empirical study in the time frame,
nineteen forty eight to ninety eight about who it was that represented non Western countries.
So I'm going to be using non Western countries, developing countries. Now,
do you see these countries all sort of roughly to mean the same thing and concluded that there was what
they called a Western monopoly of international legal practise at the International Court of Justice?
And they attributed this lack of non Western legal representation for non
Western countries in the ICJ to the lack of expertise in non Western countries.
A subsequent study by Coumarin Rose Kumar, who had been had sort of been a clerk at the court,
came roughly to the same conclusions using a different time frame.
Ninety nine to 2012. And for them,
their primary question was how the backgrounds of the individuals that appeared before the
court seemed to influence the development of public international law by the court in.
In my own study, I replicate a lot of the data that these two prior studies came up with.
But I also specifically sought to establish the names of the law funds that appeared most frequently before the court.
And I was very interested in whether there was some non Western law firm, some Nunnally City law firms that appeared before the court.
I was also very interested in naming the members of the most frequent council that appeared before the court.
The prior studies had tried to do that, but not as systematically as I tried to do in my own study.
And I also was very interested in measuring the extent to which when the won
nationals of NAANU ACP countries in the legal teams representing Nuño ECD countries,
how much of the time before the court this nun, this Nationals of the Nun or ECD teams?
Spent presenting the legal arguments up, as opposed to merely providing the geographical background,
the history or some other non-legal questions often, usually at the beginning of the oral hearings before the court.
So as I was very interested in sort of gathering as detailed information on this as as possible with regard to the national teams,
I focussed only on the agents that counsel, the advocates, the legal experts, the various combinations of these.
So this doesn't include the secretaries, the witnesses that steady of assistance.
You know, if you've been to The Hague at an aura hearing, you know, there's a whole coterie of people that appear there,
including ambassadors and and diplomatic types on behalf of their countries.
So my period was nineteen ninety eight to two thousand nineteen.
And I looked at all the contentious cases that the court decided in that period.
And based on sort of just the bean counting, there were fifty five applicants and fifty five respondent countries.
I counted the intervening countries, eight of them separately.
Most of what I would be talking about with you relates to the fifty five applicants and fifty five respondent countries, not intervening countries.
I have data for that, but my dataset is a little too large for it,
for this presentation to include every element of the data that I that I that I have.
So after identifying these cases, then I, with my research assistants, tried to figure out who the legal teams were representing each country.
I mean, this is not data that is collected systematically.
So it required actually perusing the pages of the oral proceedings, which are published by the court.
The other major task was to figure out the nationalities of the legal teams on either side.
I can tell you that this is an ongoing exercise.
You know, I've been trying to complete this with with as much accuracy as I can.
It's not easy because this kind of information is especially on nationalities.
It's not information that is disclosed publicly. It's mostly private information.
So there are some instances in which inferences were made.
But I can say with certainty that we were able to identify where the liquid, the individuals in the legal teams were located,
whether they were located in a non always city country or in an oil city country.
So the exercise in terms of how the study was taken.
Like I said, is sort of to look at the oral proceedings as sort of the point of departure and essentially counting the
pages to establish the share of each member of the legal team's contribution to the oral proceedings.
You know how long each of these members of the legal team held the floor during the oral proceedings?
The two previous studies emphasised the oral proceedings are a really important part
of the cases before the court because they often highlight the most significant
points of controversy and and therefore they may be a good proxy for the level
of participation in terms of legal expertise amongst the members of the court.
So in terms of the next point about trying to determine the share of each member of a legal team aid on the applicant side or the respondent side,
how much time they held on the floor of the court?
I used to 60 percent as a benchmark for trying to figure out the sort of level of participation by each member of of a legal team and each legal team.
Of course, as I have implied. Crisis largely of nationals.
Eight of the applicant or the respondent and non nationals and.
The reason that I used the 60 percent benchmark, I could have used the 50 plus one percent to establish whether, for example,
the non nationals had the largest share or the lesser share in terms of how long they held the floor of the court during the all of the proceedings.
It didn't make a difference whether it was 60 percent or 50 plus one percent.
The McArthur's that he used 60 percent.
And I sort of just stayed with the 60 percent because it didn't make a huge difference in terms of the results.
And and so I was also interested to see, of course,
whether there were any non OPEC countries that that held the floor the entire time where their nationals held the floor the entire time.
So that's how I've organised my my sort of my my results.
Just to emphasise again, this distinction that I'm drawing between Oys, D.N.A., ECD countries.
You know, this is really what I think is my proxy for Western buses, none Western.
It's not an exact sort of proxy.
As we know, sort of this category of the OCD does have some countries that may be considered to be developing countries or non Western countries.
But in any event, it's the proxy that I used.
And perhaps we can have a discussion as to whether this is a good proxy or not or whether the results actually would change.
You know, I think there's quite some random randomness in the categories.
In any event, First World and Third World, as some of you may know,
I think of the Third World as an epistemic location and not necessarily a geographical location, but for these purposes.
I had to have some proxy for sort of making this distinction.
And this is the the one that I stayed with. Of the 55 applicant states in my dataset, forty nine one none.
Or you see these countries. And of the 55 respondents, 29 are none.
We see the countries, which means clearly that or is none,
or ACP countries or developing countries are the major market composing of the
legal teams appearing in proceedings before the International Court of Justice.
They are really sort of the players.
If you're a lawyer seeking to represent one of these countries, you would be looking to because they're the ones that appear more frequently than oil.
Always see these countries before the International Court of Justice. So to present the results,
known a little more detail in terms of proportional representation on the legal teams representing their country at the ICJ.
None. Or you see, the Nationals were in the minority more often than their were in the majority.
So. Across both the applicant and the respondent states,
Nunnally City nationals were in the minority overall for the applicants of the forty nine Dunaway's the country's 34,
had less than 60 percent of their nationals on the team.
And for the respondents, twenty nine of the Nano ACP countries that had less than six percent of their nationals on their legal
team are some standout countries like Peru and India had a majority of their nationals on their own.
They are on their legal teams. So there are exceptions, which seems sort of an important point for me, too, in my ongoing work.
Find out whether why it is that India and Peru have a standout relative to the rest of the OCD countries.
And we can talk about that.
Maybe some people may have some good ideas in terms of why that might be the case in terms of or a presentation before the court.
The results are very similar to the results with regard to the composition of the legal teams.
None always see the Nationals performed underwhelming.
As this slide shows, especially by second bullet point, the total number of cases where not OCD nationals presented 75 to 100 percent of the kids,
while only five or only four percent of my public dataset.
So. The other point to note is that I didn't include the statistics or the data here is that most of the nano ECD lawyers council
agents were on their feet when presenting the history of the case or the geographical context of which was a boundary dispute.
They were not on their feet when the legal questions, the most controversial legal questions between the parties were being discussed.
So who is this? Was it there was sort of presenting the the the legal arguments.
Is gonna be, of course, the next question. And just for context, there is like a note in my third bullet point, there are massive gender imbalance.
Only two hundred and thirty female lawyers as opposed to eight hundred and nineteen male lawyers appeared before the court.
In my dataset, I'm still trying to break it down in terms of of whether of the numbers,
in terms of the female lawyers who actually were on their feet in the various in the various cases only for naanu ECD law firms.
What given instructions by Nano ECD state. So there's a question there regarding, you know, do this.
Not always see these countries. Figure that they might win this case by appointing an OCD law firm as opposed to a law firm in a nano OCD country.
You know, it is a question of the demand. You know, whether part of the explanation for this is on the demand side.
That's a question to sort of think about. So who are like I said, you know, who are this elite ICJ bar?
And here I just sort of putting out the ICJ bar with those with only five cases.
I have a list of all of them, including those with only one case.
But these are the leading ones. And you can see at the very top is an employer who has 26 in my dataset, 26 cases and all the way down.
These are all names that we all know very well in our discipline.
I don't think there are any surprises here. But he also confirms the studies that I mentioned before that noted the dominance of UK.
I mean, European based academics or practitioners as opposed to those from the United States, for example,
clearly in sort of these sort of high frequency legal counsel, none from the nano ECD countries.
Law firms and I use law firms loosely because some of this don't define themselves as law firms in the UK.
I think they define themselves in all sorts of ways. So I'm not entering into that debate.
Perhaps you guys can give me better advice. Don't get into trouble by defining some of this as as law funds.
It's complicated. But again, you can see it's it's the same usual suspects.
There are no surprises here. Again, it's some of the leading global funds that are appearing more frequently than law firms from elsewhere.
Again, the United Kingdom dominates the appearances before the court.
And these are really huge numbers,
considering that a margin that the competition to sort of represent one of these countries in these cases is pretty intense.
But in any event, the data speaks for itself.
I don't think there are any particular surprises, any particular surprises, at least.
I wasn't very surprised when I saw a lot of these names.
And I think that a lot of this law firms or whatever entities, let's call them, had a lot of these entities,
their share of cases in other fora in international law might be very similar.
But I'm not dealing with other fora, but I suspect that it's very similar.
Nonoy, seedy law firms. So the one there were there were four. This is exciting for me, though.
Some for naanu ECD law firms, including one from the Congo.
In one of the Congo cases is one from Russia, one from Serbia, Montenegro and one from Bahrain.
But three of them, three of them actually appeared together with a major law firms.
None of them was appearing on on on their own as the lead law firm,
sort of the one that had instructions to to lead the legal team appearing on behalf of a country.
So. The data, in my view, is instructive.
Without more. It confirms the continuity of this very exclusive ICJ bar.
This is not even my point. This is the point in the literature, even the literature that doesn't have the data of a senior white male from
Western countries dominating practise at the International Court of Justice.
So I have questions. You know, a lot of the literature emphasises expertise and deep knowledge and experience and social capital and reputation.
And when I started writing my write up several months ago, I, I sort of developed a very long draught.
But then I got very dissatisfied. I just couldn't figure out whether these were the explanations, the only explanations for the data.
It seemed to me that these explanations were begging more questions than answering the questions that I had.
And so I began thinking about also the way in which this elite lawyers build and develop
this elite reputations that enable them to be this repeat players and that this law firms,
too, have so many cases before the court. And so the things I'll tell you that, you know, as I conclude the things that I'm thinking about and,
you know, we can open this for discussion because I don't have the answers yet.
But I'll tell you what I'm thinking. I think that it's really important to explore the way that these elite lawyers and law
firms occupy critical choke points in the Internet into international legal ecosystem.
Let me call it that way. This is in terms of things like they're leading academics, they're in the leading journals.
They make International Law Commission, then the leading a betrayal bodies.
They are run by all this ranking bodies.
This is, you know, some of them we know are occupying simultaneous, important, significant positions, for example,
in the International Law Commission and deciding cases in international, be Tresham,
on the very questions for which they have responsibility in International Law Commission.
Some of them we know from, you know, anecdotes have articles out there on cases in which they are appearing either as counsel or on whatever side.
So this is sort of looking at the international intense national economic international law,
Eco-System, and not sort of just thinking about the court. So I think that is really important on trying to figure that out.
And it's really hard to figure out. But I think that there is something there.
I think something more than simply about deep knowledge and deep, deep expertise and deep experience.
So we have to unpack what that really means, in my view.
But also, I think it's very important to think about the sophisticated and strategic lobbying for clients,
especially for those that are in the big law funds with Connexions and Resources.
And so one of the things that I've studied doing is that I have studied conducting interviews, off the record interviews.
So there are things I could say and there are things I couldn't say.
But I think that for us to really develop a better understanding of of of of this data, I think one has to go to that level.
I'm not sure that I'll be able to do that with any level of authority that I can publish anything.
But I'm just intrigued that I want to continue pursuing this.
So the last thing I want to say is that you have two more slides.
But one is to say that I. I don't know how to say this, but.
I'm also interested in figuring out on the demand side for the Nano ECD countries, the way in which these appointments happen.
At least I know in the international nutrition context,
why down the street is that if if an investor designates a particular lawyer in London to be to be appointed as the arbitrator,
that the respondent country is likely to go to Paris or come back to London or to be New York or to be in Washington,
D.C. too much, the the council the arbitrator has been appointed on the other side.
And I don't know whether this is what's happening in the ICJ. Maybe we can talk about that.
And I you know, so there are things here that I think need to be figured out.
And and they are really important. Now, with regard to that,
this one of the thing that's really been quite revealing is that all this leading
lawyers have won national awards in the countries that they've represented.
So they're these sort of prestigious awards given to non nationals by the executive branches of the various countries around the world.
And I have started developing all these lists of these elite prises, national recognition prises that these leading lawyers have received,
which suggests to me that they are deeply embedded and connected within those national context in which they represent.
In one case, one of those is one of the cases, one of the cases, the case was nationally televised.
The lawyer in question who represented this country was a celebrity in that country.
So this are the types of things that I'm interested in figuring out.
And maybe this doesn't sound very academic, but this is what interests me.
You know, things that appear in the national in The New York Times is about Paul Reckless.
And this is, you know, maybe the second article in just a couple of years about his, you know, about his his practise.
You know, I think it's instructive for some of the things that I'm trying to trace for which I think there needs to be more research on.
So thank you very much for your patience and listening to my ramblings.
And I look forward to the conversation. Thank you very much.