Acknowledgments
I submitted this work as a doctoral thesis to the Faculty of Law of the University of Fribourg on 4 July 2017. The viva took place on 18 December 2017, the day on which the Faculty of Law accepted this thesis. Subsequent developments, including relevant case law and scholarship, have been taken into account up to June 2019.
I would not have completed this thesis without the support of many people, to whom I would like to express all my gratitude. First, I am deeply grateful to Samantha Besson, my supervisor, for her guidance and generosity throughout the thesis. Her extremely thorough, intellectually stimulating, and constructive feedback helped me tremendously. I would like to warmly thank her for allowing me to learn from her own work and outstanding scholarship, for continuously encouraging me, but also for always challenging me, and for prompting me not to take any concepts or theories for granted.
Timothy Endicott has been an incredibly generous, thoughtful, and inspiring mentor during my research stay at the University of Oxford in 2016–17. I am extremely grateful for the detailed and continuous feedback he provided on the various theoretical chapters of this book, as well as for his consistent support while I was in the final months of my research. His encouragement and guidance helped me tie up the loose ends of this book, and prepare the manuscript for submission.
Several people at my alma mater, the University of Fribourg, made indispensable contributions to my analysis. The many insightful doctoral seminars, workshops, and conferences organized by Samantha Besson while I worked as her research assistant in 2013–15 (but also beyond) played a crucial role in both the early and more advanced stages of my research. Among those are the two doctoral conferences I attended in Münchenwiler (2014) and Ueberstorf (2015), the two ProDoc conferences in Fribourg (2014 and 2015), and a range of methodological and substantive seminars and scientific workshops with senior scholars, from which I have benefitted hugely. The lunch talks organized by Professor Pascal Pichonnaz allowed me to collect constructive feedback, notably from Professors Michel Heinzmann, Alexandra Rumo, and Walter Stoffel, as well as from peer doctoral researchers. My thinking has also been stimulated by Professor Edward Swiderski’s fascinating philosophy course on ‘Interpretation in the Arts’, which I audited in Spring 2014 at the University of Fribourg. I would like to thank the members of my jury, Professors Samantha Besson, Eva Maria Belser, Gerhard Fiolka, and Alexandra Rumo, for their insightful questions and comments. I am also grateful to Professor Adriano Previtali for presiding over the viva with his usual delightful and calming sense of humor.
I would like to thank those who took the time to engage with my work during my research stay in the United Kingdom in 2016–17. Raquel Barradas de Freitas generously shared her unpublished and truly excellent work with me and provided some very thoughtful and illuminating comments. I am grateful to the participants in the Oxford Public International Law Research Seminar and in the Oxford Graduate Legal Research Conference for their feedback. I especially thank Miles Jackson and Dapo Akande for their critical and stimulating observations. I am also grateful to Eyal Benvenisti for generously sharing some of his then unpublished work on international law in domestic courts with me.
I am indebted to many people whose path I crossed during my LL.M. and subsequent research stay at Harvard Law School in 2015–16. William Alford, Jane Bestor, Gabriella Blum, Scott Brewer, Richard Fallon, Gábor Kajtar, David Kennedy, Duncan Kennedy, Michael Klarman, Priyasha Saksena, and Lewis Sargentich all provided very helpful comments while I was working on different papers on international law and legal theory. Jane Bestor kindly suggested that I present an early draft of what is now Chapter 5 at Harvard Law School in November 2016, and I am very grateful for the feedback I received on this occasion. I am also indebted to the participants to the 2016 Doctoral Scholarship Conference at Yale Law School for their helpful comments on this draft.
In Heidelberg, I was able to access relevant scholarly resources, to participate in academic discussions pertaining to international law, and to discuss some of the difficulties experienced in my research with a range of legal scholars and peers specializing in international law. I would like to thank Anne Peters for offering me this opportunity.
My research stays would not have been possible without the support of Samantha Besson, Gabriella Blum, Timothy Endicott, Bernard Jaggy, Flavien Mariatte, Anne Peters, Nicolas Queloz, and Victor V. Ramraj. I am immensely grateful to them. I am also very thankful to the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, to the Janggen-Pöhn Foundation, and to Harvard Law School for their generous financial support, which made it possible for me to spend over a year in the United States (August 2015–September 2016). Through its Doc.Mobility scheme, the Swiss National Science Foundation provided invaluable support in the second phase of my research at the University of Oxford (October 2016–June 2017) and at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg (July–September 2017). I am also very grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for supporting the pre-press stage of this publication.
Several people kindly accepted to answer my questions linked to the mechanics of judicial reasoning. I am thankful to Judge Heinz Aemisegger, Anne-Laurence Graf-Brugère, Julia Hänni, and Marie Jenny. I also thank Pola Cebulak, Benjamin Cheynel, Benedikt Pirker, Yael Ronen, Christa Tobler, Philippa Webb, and Marlene Wind for their comments on papers written in parallel to my PhD and which informed this book. My research was especially enriched by the two workshops on ‘International Courts and Domestic Politics’ convened by Marlene Wind at the Center of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) of the University of Copenhagen (2014) and at the Center for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order (PluriCourts) of the University of Oslo (2015). I also benefitted from participating in the conference on ‘The Neglected Methodologies of International Law’ which Rossana Deplano and Paolo Vargiu organized at the University of Leicester in January 2018. I am grateful to Valentin Jeutner for his kind invitation to present my work at Lund University in September 2018, which made it possible for me to obtain additional feedback. Evelyne Schmid and her students at the University of Lausanne provided helpful comments on several pieces related to this project when I was finalizing the manuscript for publication in Spring 2019. I am particularly indebted to León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, Raffael Fasel, Marie-Louise Gächter-Alge, Benedikt Pirker, Talita Sousa Dias, and Jonas Wüthrich for their constructive feedback on various draft chapters. All errors remain, of course, my own.
Since 2014, I have been able to contribute to the Oxford Reports on International law in Domestic Courts (ildc). I am grateful to Professor Andreas Ziegler for giving me the opportunity to be part of the Swiss reporters’ team, and to the editors of ildc for the constructive feedback they have provided on the headnotes I have submitted over the years.
I would like to thank Marie Sheldon, Kelley Baylis, and Johanna Lee from Brill/Nijhoff, who guided me through the publication process and answered all the questions I had. I am also grateful to two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive and excellent comments, and for their (and the editors’) interest in a book that focuses on the Swiss case law on international law. Many thanks are owed to Chantal Ammann-Doubliez, Hans-Robert Ammann, Vincent Barras, and Hélène Feest for patiently and diligently proofreading the final manuscript and the proofs, and for their excellent and thoughtful suggestions. I am also indebted to Angela Hefti, who helped me access relevant scholarship as I was finalizing the manuscript. I am very grateful to Rae Pozdro, who designed the cover of this book. I cannot think of a better cover than one of her drawings.
From May 2018 onwards, the Public Law Research Group (‘Fachgruppe Öffentliches Recht’) of the Law Institute of the University of Zurich offered me a privileged environment to focus on my research, which also made it possible for me to work on the final edits leading to the publication of this book. I am deeply grateful to all members of the Research Group for giving me this opportunity.
The PhD experience would not have been the same without my dear friends, in Switzerland and abroad. They have all contributed, in some way or another, to the completion of this book – they know who they are! Thank you also to the baristas of Darwin’s Ltd, Bourbon Coffee, Hi-Rise, Society Coffee, Gail’s, Café Nero, and Vicafé, who provided me with my favorite beverage, especially in the most intense writing phases.
I would like to thank my parents and my sister for their unconditional encouragement throughout my education, law studies, and doctorate. This book is dedicated to them. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my partner for his unwavering support from the very beginning of this project.
Zurich, June 2019