ILA Regional Seminar Series - Competing Claims to Authority in International Law: The Theory of Deference Pull of Alternatives - Fuad Zarbiyev - 23 March 2023 13:30 (UK)

Competing Claims to Authority in International Law: The Theory of Deference Pull of Alternatives

Fuad Zarbiyev, Associate Professor of International Law, Co-Directors, Geneva Graduate Institute

Situations in which claims to authority clash with each other abound in international law, ranging from conflicting jurisdictional claims among states and competition for authority among international adjudicative bodies to the disputed allocation of powers among international and domestic authorities in various issue areas. What is common to all these situations is that each claim to authority is typically supported by some formal or informal basis for eliciting deference. For instance, a formally-grounded (e.g., the official mandate) authority claim of one institution might clash with a substantively-grounded (e.g., specialized expertise) claim to deference of another, or a territorial claim to jurisdiction of one state might confront a protection-based assertion of jurisdiction of another.

Yet the practice shows that not all claims to deference entitlement are situated on the same plane, some exerting greater attraction than others. Exclusively mandate-based authority claims, for instance, rarely gain the upper hand over epistemically-grounded claims to deference. However, neither international law nor international relations scholarship has paid sustained attention to the adjudication of competing claims to authority in international law, and the lack of an empirically-grounded and systematic theoretical account hampers our understanding of the dynamic of authority relations in the international legal order.

This paper seeks to contribute to filling this gap by bringing to bear on the practice of competing claims to authority in international law a largely under-explored approach of authority and argues that competing claims to authority in the international legal order are generally adjudicated on the basis of the deference pull of authority attributes of different alternatives at play.

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