10 - Bringing Principles into Practice: Grappling with Deference in International Adjudication

Summary

This chapter draws together the preceding conceptual and empirical analysis of deference in international adjudication to explore how the principles discussed in the preceding pages might be used to inform approaches to deference in practice. This chapter does not develop a prescriptive approach to deference in international adjudication. It instead offers a framework to inform the analysis of deference in international adjudication. Section 10.1 addresses debates as to whether international adjudicative deference to domestic decision makers is desirable at all. Section 10.2 examines whether approaches to deference should be ‘fixed’ in favour of some doctrinal approaches over others. Section 10.3 explores how a framework for analysing deference might be created, which allows evolution and malleability in approaches to deference while securing some level of predictability and transparency in practice. Section 10.4 concludes.