Although the 13 United States courts of appeals are the final word on 99 percent of all federal cases, there is no detailed account of how these courts operate. How do judges decide which decisions are binding precedents and which are not? Who decides whether appeals are argued orally? What administrative structures do these courts have? The answers to these and hundreds of other questions are largely unknown, not only to lawyers and legal academics but also to many within the judiciary itself. Written and Unwritten is the first book to provide an inside look at how these courts operate. An unprecedented contribution to the field of judicial administration, the book collects the differing local rules and internal procedures of each court of appeals. In-depth interviews of the chief judges of all 13 circuits and surveys of all clerks of court reveal previously undisclosed practices and customs.

This chapter explores what a flexible approach to eligibility entails for state redress programmes. Setting parameters for eligible claims necessarily involves a series of difficult trade-offs. The parameters of eligibility also have significant operative implications, helping determine the evidence a survivor needs to provide, which, in turn, is an important factor in determining the quantity, and character, of the information a programme needs to manage. The trade-offs involved support the argument for flexible redress programmes that enable survivors to choose how they will pursue redress.

The success of legal time in migration law is exemplified by the multitude of possibilities to differentiate, categorize, and calculate human life by means of time. This is based on an intricate play between two complementing and contradicting forms of time: human time and clock time. The success of clock time in law can be related to its objective character, which allows for quantification and calculation. It is this quantification that provides a clarity and logic to processes that are otherwise rather intangible. It is the transformation from an individual process of human time into quantifiable, calculable chunks of clock time that enables the simple, general application in law. An extra value of this generality is its visibility, it is easy to demonstrate that a certain policy has changed based on clock time. However, legal time cannot be equated with clock time, the reference to time in law is always the time of someone, and therefore it is characterized by temporality. The virtues of legal time can be seen at work in several temporal differentiations in migration law: differentiation based on temporality, deadlines, qualification of time, and procedural differentiation.

Like most other types of human activity, international legal practice relies heavily on deadlines. Yet deadlines have received little attention in international legal scholarship. This is the case even though deadlines are heavily studied in other contexts, with research finding that people frequently set and respond to deadlines in ways consistent with bounded rather than perfect rationality. This chapter takes up the topic of deadlines in international legal practice and makes four contributions. First, using the Chemical Weapons Convention as a case study, it explores ways in which deadlines are used in international legal practice and highlights just how pervasive they can be. Second, it reviews some behavioral research on deadlines in other contexts and demonstrates that these findings have intriguing parallels with how the Convention’s deadlines have functioned in practice. Third, it assesses the evidence available for evaluating the relevance of domestic research to international affairs in relation to deadlines. The chapter argues that, even though this evidence is currently limited, legal actors would do well to factor this research into their decision-making about how to structure and respond to deadlines. Finally, the chapter considers the extent to which these issues are common to both diplomacy and international law.