This introduction to Section 4 of the volume on court judgements and related works discusses the nature of recent research on the subject and comments on the increased availability of primary sources (in the form of sijillāt) from the Ottoman period onwards, including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.

Complaints procedures offer a unique opportunity for individuals and groups to have claims of human rights violations considered and their rights vindicated in a judicial or quasi-judicial procedure. On the one hand, for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and human rights lawyers, complaints procedures are an important avenue to pursue strategic objectives, in addition to supporting victims in individual cases. States, on the other hand, may find themselves having to defend allegations of specific or systemic violations. Ideally, complaints procedures act as a mirror that provides an opportunity for states to bring their practices into conformity with the respective treaty. In practice, however, states often view unfavourable decisions as unwarranted criticism, which may create difficulties at the implementation stage. The treaty bodies themselves are in theory neutral arbiters that apply the treaty provisions and rules of procedures. However, inevitably, their position as bodies created by states, and relying on states’ cooperation on the one hand and seeking the effective protection of human rights on the other, raises a host of challenges in actual practice.

Chapter 4 commences a survey of the Court of Requests’ litigants. Drawing data out of the entire Court archive, it charts the origins of cases and clients in counties across English-governed territories and the status identifiers ascribed to both petitioners and defendants. The demography of this Court is characterised by considerable geographical and social breadth; this was a truly ‘national’ tribunal, accessible to everyone from poor widows and humble craftsmen to civic officials and the landed classes. The chapter puts these findings into dialogue with the scholarship on the relative litigiousness of English regions and on wealth distribution in early modernity. Finally, the chapter tests the claim that Requests was the ‘poor man’s court’, asking whether we can identify truly impoverished individuals among the standard social categorisations appearing in court records. It argues that royal justice could serve litigants of more humble status, though this observation will be qualified in following chapters.

This chapter offers a new framework for theorizing about the roles of different types of actors who participate in processes of cross-fertilization. All of these actors have complex or mixed motives: while actors may place some value on the coherence of the international legal system, they weigh such systemic concerns against other, more immediate concerns. International judges, for example, may place value on the coherence of the international legal system, but they may place greater emphasis on the autonomy of their own specialized or regional legal order, on the normative values of that order and on their own authority within that order. Other actors, by contrast, may place little or no value on international legal coherence, but favor or oppose cross-fertilization as a function of its effect on the their likelihood of prevailing in a dispute. In a world of complex actor preferences, the process of cross-fertilization is likely to resemble, not a consensual process of management, but a constant struggle among a wide variety of actors, some of whom will champion cross-fertilization while others seek to prevent or limit it.

The Prologue introduces the fundamental concepts of the book (antislavery, abolition, judicial forum), and Colombia’s ambiguous manumission law of 1821. Colombian leaders embraced a politics of antislavery by criticizing the Atlantic slave system and Spanish colonialism as a form of political slavery, but their efforts to speed the coming of a world with no slavery were lukewarm. They took the gradual emancipation approach, leaving most slaves in captivity, upholding the property rights of masters, and offering no citizenship to slaves and most former slaves. By contrast, some slaves and a few magistrates developed radical antislavery positions, calling for the unconditional end of slavery. However, antislavery and anti-Spanish politics had overlapping legal origins and tensions that emerged in the political exchanges and debates that transpired during litigation. In this judicial forum – a space of antislavery and abolition in a society with no freedom of the press or association – many slaves articulated their vision of a peaceful and complete end of slavery. They hoped to become law-abiding, God-fearing vassals of the king and, later on, citizens of the early republics.

Complaints procedures offer a unique opportunity for individuals and groups to have claims of human rights violations considered and their rights vindicated in a judicial or quasi-judicial procedure. For non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and human rights lawyers, complaints procedures are an important avenue to pursue strategic objectives, in addition to supporting victims in individual cases. States, on the other hand, may find themselves having to defend allegations of specific or systemic violations. Ideally, complaints procedures act as a mirror that provides an opportunity for states to bring their practices into conformity with the respective treaty.

The Indian Supreme Court has been called “the most powerful court in the world” for its wide jurisdiction, its expansive understanding of its own powers, and the billion plus people under its authority. Yet scholars and policy makers have a very uneven picture of the court’s functioning: deep knowledge about the more visible, “high-profile” cases but very little about more mundane, but far more numerous and potentially equally important, decisions. This chapter aims to address this imbalance with a rigorous, empirical account of the Court’s decisions from 2010 to 2015. We use the most extensive original dataset of Indian Supreme Court opinions yet created to provide a broad, quantitative overview of the social identity of the litigants that approach the court, the types of matters they bring to the court, the levels of success that different groups of litigants have before the Court, and the opinion-writing patterns of the various judges of the Supreme Court. This analysis provides foundational facts for the study of the Court and its role in progressive social change.

The Indian Supreme Court sits in panels and can have up to 31 judges. This chapter explores how the Indian Supreme Court developed its current structure and the impact of this structure on its functioning. It argues that the Supreme Court’s structure has a range of inter-related effects that includes increasing access to the Court, producing a “polyvocal” jurisprudence that destabilizes stare decisis, spurring experimentation among judges, fostering a “Chief Justice dominant” Court, and reducing the perceived partisanship of judges. Mapping the structure of the Court, as well as the Court’s relationship with the rest of the judiciary, helps us appreciate how judges ultimately interpret the law and the Constitution not in isolation, but within a larger judicial architecture.