The 2014 Judicial Activity of the International Court of Justice

Abstract

The three disparate cases decided by the International Court of Justice (Court or ICJ) in 2014 may not contribute much to the development of substantive international law, but they are instructive about the operations of the Court. Perhaps the Court was not at its finest in terms of coherent legal reasoning in these three cases; it certainly avoided difficult questions in all of them. Yet each of the three cases had significant numbers of separate and dissenting opinions, which sometimes reveal more about the Court’s reasoning than is apparent from the judgment or order itself.