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Abstract

What stories do international courts tell about themselves? This dissertation takes judgments, speeches, press releases, webpages, judges’ extra-judicial writings and other documentation as autobiographical pieces that reveal how these adjudicatory bodies perceive their roles and portray themselves to the outside world. Focusing on the International Court of Justice, the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization, and the European Court of Justice, it argues that judicial autobiography strives to both impose the criteria on the basis of which these courts are assessed and grant themselves the highest standing among different adjudicatory bodies. Examining the stories that international courts narrate about themselves provides a new perspective into how they struggle for relevance, construct their subject-matter expertise, rationalize their successes and failures, and ultimately what it means to become an international court. This thesis argues that the fashioning of judicial identity has concrete implications and manifestations in the construction of autonomous fields of law and the making of the social identities of the professionals that form part of the communities that revolve around each of these adjudicatory bodies.

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