Madsen: Who Rules the World? The Educational Capital of the International Judiciary

Mikael Madsen (Univ. of Copenhagen - Law) has posted Who Rules the World? The Educational Capital of the International Judiciary (Univ. of California Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

While the proliferation of ICs has been described in details, we know surprisingly little about who the actual judges sitting at the helm of contemporary judicialized international law and ruling (on) the world are. What has once been termed the “invisible college of international law” remains to a large extent invisible to this day. But it is now a much larger college as the proliferation of ICs has resulted in a corresponding multiplication of the number of international judges. Today, more than three hundred men and women hold the office of international judge. Most are found in Europe, at the two regional courts of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, but many other regional and global courts also employ a significant number of international judges. Besides some mainly descriptive studies of the international judiciary, we have very little analysis of who these people are and what commonalities they have, notably in terms of education, knowledge, and know-how. This paper remedies this gap in scholarship and presents a first systematic study of the configuration of the international judiciary.