What is (International) Judicial Governance?

This chapter delineates judicial governance as a scholarly discipline and as a field encompassing institutions, norms, and practices concerned with the oversight of judicial institutions and aiming to ensuring their orderly and effective functioning. It undertakes a scoping exercise to map key normative and institutional issues of judicial governance arising at the domestic level, which may serve as a frame of reference for examining the governance of international courts. This includes the exploration of the concepts and principles of judicial independence and accountability, an assessment of the relationship between external and internal judicial governance, and a discussion of the main institutional models. The chapter then moves beyond domestic orders to consider how the transposition of adjudication and judicial governance into the international sphere reshapes its parameters, power relationships, and applicable normative constraints which can be used to form normative judgements on the quality of governance arrangements in that domain.