HiiL Law of the Future Conference 2008
The Changing Role of Highest Courts in an Internationalising World
On 23 and 24 October 2008 the second HiiL Annual Conference took place in the Peace Palace in The Hague. The central theme of this conference was the changing role of national highest courts in an internationalized world. The general focus of the HiiL research programme – the challenges faced by national legal orders as a consequence of globalization – was considered from the vantage point of national highest courts because of their unique responsibility as organs and, in many ways, custodians of their respective legal orders.
An opening plenary session of the conference included keynote addresses by Dr. Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Minister of Justice of the Netherlands, and Justice Willibrord Davids, President of the Netherlands Hoge Raad. The discussion followed on three parallel workshops. Each workshop addressed a specific research question dealing with specific dimensions of the central conference theme. The following questions formed the basis of the presentations and discussions in each workshop:
- Workshop 1: ‘What is the role of highest courts in maintaining legal unity in the internationalising world of today?’
- Workshop 2: ‘Is the separation of powers a measure of judicial legitimacy that can successfully accommodate the exigencies of a globalised world, or does judicial internationalisation compel us to find additional or novel paradigms for anchoring this legitimacy?’
- Workshop 3: ’In what ways do national courts to engage in transjudicialism, what processes, mechanisms and practices exist and how are these processes, mechanisms and practices likely to develop?’
The final Plenary Session brought to light the main conclusions of the three workshops, and was concluded with a stimulating Final Panel that addressed the question: What has been or should be the role of national judiciaries, in particular highest courts, in the process of the internationalization of law and the increasing interconnectedness between national legal systems? The Panel was chaired by Sam Muller and offered the expertise of Justice Michael Kirby, Judge of the High Court of Australia, Justice Geert Corstens, Judge of the Hoge Raad of the Netherlands, Justice Albie Sachs, Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Justice Bruno Cotte, Judge of the Hague International Criminal Court, Justice OGon Kwon, Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Justice Kenneth Keith, Judge of the International Court of Justice.
A book containing the edited papers from the conference is slated to appear in the course of 2009 under the auspices of T.M.C Asser / Cambridge University Press.
For more Conference 2008 documents click here.
More information:
The 2008 annual HiiL Law of the Future Conference was generously supported by the Erasmus University Rotterdam, L'Institut des Hautes Études sur la Justice, Utrecht University, Caselex and the Dutch Ministry of Justice.
