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.
