Introduction to Symposium on Nienke Grossman, “Achieving Sex-Representative International Court Benches”

Extract

In “Achieving Sex-Representative International Court Benches,” Nienke Grossman begins with embarrassing statistics. Despite decades of progress on gender equality, women are still quite scarce on international benches. Grossman reframes the debate on gender equity in a powerful way. Most promisingly, she suggests that greater meritocracy and greater gender equity go hand in hand. As she argues, “international judgeships are often used to reward political loyalty” and “political horse-trading among states” abounds. For these reasons, reforms to broaden the pool of candidates and to increase the transparency of the selection process would also result in the appointment of more women, in all likelihood. In addition, Grossman puts forth a provocative legal claim—she argues that “states are legally required to take steps to understand and remedy the paucity of women judges on most international court benches.”