The members of the Singapore International Commercial Court (‘SICC’) include both Singaporean and non-Singaporean ‘international’ judges. The SICC is domestic, in that it is established under Singaporean law as a division of the Singapore Court system, and international in the sense that it hears international commercial disputes, including cases which have no connection with Singapore apart from a choice of court agreement designating the SICC as the forum for dispute resolution. This chapter identifies the rationales for the appointment of international judges to the SICC, contrasting the SICC with domestic courts which use foreign judges and with nine other international commercial courts around the world. It shows how the different objectives and target markets of international commercial courts, as well as the constitutional laws and traditions of the host state, influence the decision whether or not to appoint foreign judges. The chapter suggests that international commercial dispute resolution today favours the appointment of specialist foreign judges to commercial courts having similar aspirations as the SICC.

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.

This chapter discusses the appropriate types of expertise that should be available in the composition of international courts. The main argument is that the international bench needs to include judges with diverse and specialised expertise. For this reason, the concept ‘competence in international law’ as a statutory requirement for nomination and election of judges can be construed broadly, seeking out individuals who not only have recognised competence in international law sensu stricto but also strong complementary knowledge in specialised area(s) of international law relevant to a given court’s judicial work. Judges who are conversant with both general and special aspects and areas of international law are well placed to navigate the complexity and density of international law entrenched in disputes submitted for international adjudication. The first part of the discussion engages with the idea that general international courts value expertise of judges in specialised areas of international law and that specialised international courts value judges with competence in international law. Existing statutory election requirements can accommodate this suggestion. The second part of the discussion explores the detailed expertise requirements incorporated in the statutes of certain, new international courts. Novel developments suggest a turn towards favouring and quantifying required expertise in different areas of international law when deciding the overall composition of a court.