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Abstract
It is a well-known dogma that there is no rule of precedent in international law; judicial decisions bind only the parties to a case. It is also said that precedents end debates. Yet in practice, international lawyers—especially before international courts—rely heavily on precedents, which often ignite new struggles. This thesis examines the authority that precedents exert over international lawyers and, more broadly, in international law, from a socio-legal and critical perspective. Conceiving international law as an adversarial field where lawyers compete to make their arguments prevail, I define precedents not merely as past decisions but as ideas of the past materialised in valid legal form: judicial decisions. I argue that the authority of precedents is a relative and relational mechanism of social and cognitive control. Lawyers give precedence to prior decisions when they perceive in them—consciously or not—authoritative attributes. The more resources lawyers mobilise, the more attributes a precedent accumulates, thereby increasing its authority, its constraining power. While resistance is always possible—whether tactical or overt—it is itself shaped by the authority it seeks to challenge. International lawyers, regardless of their role, both constrain and are constrained by precedents. In two case studies—one on the making of LaGrand at the ICJ and another on U.S. resistance to WTO Appellate Body rulings—I show how authority and resistance to precedents function. Ultimately, I argue that precedents function as placeholders of struggle and meaning, as standards of performance, and more broadly as stabilisers of domination in international law.