The Origin of the Hague Arbitral Courts

Abstract

A few years of experience with the Permanent Court of Arbitration served to make clear the points on which it could be improved. “There was thus created,” wrote James Brown Scott as reporter of the project for a Court of Arbitral Justice, “a single institution which might decide purely legal questions on the basis of respect for law, and broader questions of a non-judicial nature, either or both of which were to be decided by judges, that is arbiters, chosen by the parties in controversy. In modern states judicial questions are decided by judges in courts of justice, and the judges are not the direct appointees of the parties. In matters of purely private interest which may be compromised, judges of the parties’ choice are as much in place as they would be out of place in a court of justice.”