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date: 12 November 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter focuses on the choices regional systems have made in designing dispute settlement systems. There are many potential options including choosing arbitration or mediation mechanisms, or creating regional courts. These different choices shape the extent to which dispute settlement becomes legalized and judicialized. The chapter discusses the state of theory and of the empirical analysis of dispute settlement systems associated with regionalism. We have a fairly good sense of the choices that governments have made, how these choices have changed significantly over time, and how the choice for a court may judicialize regional politics. But much work needs to be done so as to better understand the forces shaping these choices. The chapter summarizes the state of the art, identifying many fruitful areas for further investigation.

Keywords: regional courts, regionalism, regional dispute settlement, arbitration, judicialization of politics

Karen J. Alter

Karen J Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University, and a permanent visiting professor at the iCourts Center for Excellence, University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law. Alter is author of The European Court’s Political Power (Oxford University Press 2009), Establishing the Supremacy of European Law (Oxford University Press 2001), and The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights (Princeton University Press 2014).

Liesbet Hooghe

Liesbet Hooghe is W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Chair in Political Science, Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam, Netherlands; 2007/2008 Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study (HWK) in Northwest Germany in cooperation with the Collabo¬rative Research Center on Transformations of the State (TranState, 2003–2014) and the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS, 2007 ff.).

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