Inaugural Lecture of Professor Filippo Fontanelli

Edinburgh Law School presents the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Filippo Fontanelli

International Law in the Polycrisis: Mega-Dispute Litigation at the International Court of Justice and What It Really Achieves

About the Lecture 

In recent years the International Court of Justice has been drawn or dragged – by applicants, intervening states, and UN organs – into matters sitting at the apex of the contemporary “polycrisis”. These include interstate war framed through atrocity-prevention treaties, the legal governance of catastrophic climate risk, and conflicts whose humanitarian and geopolitical stakes are enormous. The resulting docket looks, at first sight, like a rule-of-law success story. The Court is busier; cases are larger; third-state participation on an unprecedented scale signals the participation of the global community in the discussion of shared interests and values.

This inaugural lecture assesses what this surge in mega-dispute litigation reveals about the role of international law under conditions of systemic stress. It advances two claims. First, the ICJ’s contemporary impact is best understood less through the classical lens of dispute settlement and more through audience effects: mega-cases shape the conduct of states primarily by structuring legal narratives, enabling coalition signalling, hardening diplomatic positions, and re-lawyering policy choices (including arms-transfer risk management, sanctions justification, climate bargaining leverage, and the mobilisation of responsibility and reparation vocabularies). Secondly, these same features expose a compliance paradox. The more existential the strategic stakes, the weaker the Court’s capacity to induce direct behavioural change by the primary respondent; compliance and de-escalation often remain elusive even as legal mobilisation intensifies. In this trade-off, States can extract something, but over time this occurs at the expense of the ICJ’s legitimacy and authority.

 

About the Speaker

Dr Filippo Fontanelli read Law at the University of Pisa (degree and masters, in 2004 and 2006) and at the Sant'Anna School (Diploma di Licenza and PhD, 2008 and 2012). He worked at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton LLP (Rome) from 2007 to 2009. He passed the bar exam in Italy (Rome). He holds an LLM degree from the New York University School of Law, where he served as Hauser Global LLM Fellow and received the Jerome Lipper Prize. He worked as university trainee at the International Court of Justice (The Hague), assisting H.E. Judge Cançado Trindade and H.E. Keith (2010/2011).

Dr Fontanelli is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the International Law Association, in which he was co-rapporteur of the ILA Committee on the Procedure of International Courts and Tribunals. He is member of the Faculty of the Master in International Law of the Universidad La Sabana (Bogota) and has been visiting professor at the University of Stockholm, the University of Vienna and LUISS (Rome), where he teaches the course The Protection of Human Rights in Europe as adjunct professor.

Dr Fontanelli served as academic fellow on international trade law with the Scottish Parliament's Information Centre and adviser to the Europe and External Affairs Committee (2018-2020). He acts as counsel and legal expert before international courts and tribunals, and upon appointment by international institutions, including the Council of Europe and the Venice Commission.

 

Image credit - Hassan Anayi

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