Monthly Archives: January 2024

How does a collective of judges come to a common decision? A fairly good approximation is the Median Voter Theorem, which predicts that the majority decision will reflect the position of the median judge. According to my recently released Working Paper (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4687112), the median judge on the ICJ has been shifting towards more pro-Western positions in recent years, with French (Abraham), Ugandan (Sebutinde) and Moroccan (Bennouna) judges assigned the highest probability of acting as median. As the world awaits the announcement of the Court’s interim ruling, these findings suggest a tighter outcome than in the Israeli Wall advisory opinion. 

The only International Court of Justice precedent involving Israel is its 2004 advisory opinion on the “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”. Looking at how the mode presented in a fresh Working Paper (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4687112) fits this case, what is most striking is that it was NOT a polarising issue. Instead, all judges, except the US one, came out against Israel. A pattern of isolation similar to that observed in other UN institutions. The correlation with latent support for the Western-led international order — the main geopolitical cleavage on the Court — is also weak.