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7 J. Int'l Disp. Settlement 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/jloildte7 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of International Dispute Settlement, 2016, 7, 1-2 doi: 10.1093/jnlids/idv040 Advance Access Publication Date: 20 January 2016 Editorial EDITORIAL In his most celebrated book, On Liberty, the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill defended individual liberty and freedom of thought. And quite vigorously so. He defended liberty in the name of progress and improvement. He defended it against all types of forces that suppress it. Government was not the only such force. The greater threats, he thought, came from private forces, from ourselves as societies and communities. 'The despotism of custom', he wrote, 'is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better'. Custom and progress, and in the middle stands the lib- erty to experiment. At JIDS we try to embrace this spirit of liberty. We regularly question customs and traditions, including our own. We try to keep the Journal in motion, to experi- ment, to adapt, perhaps to lead. Small alterations happen all the time. More mean- ingful change happens less often, though regularly too. Now is such a time. But let us start from the beginning. JIDS was launched in 2010 to focus on issues of enduring significance in the reso- lution of private and public international disputes. It was designed from the outset as a journal for those who take the academic side of international dispute settlement seriously. This is something we will keep doing, and we will try to keep doing it well-currently, the Journal is ranked first for 'Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution', second for 'International Trade' and second for 'Commercial Law', by the Washington and Lee University law ranking for international, non-US, law journals. Our main objective on the road ahead is to extend the Journal's purview beyond strict law approaches and include relevant areas in the social sciences and the human- ities. Legal scholars should be (more) aware of developments in neighbouring fields. Scholars in other fields may find advantages in being (better) connected to what is going on in law, even when we seem to be playing Lego with rules. Put more boldly, there is little reason to define our field of international dispute settlement according to classic disciplinary boundaries, some of which go back to Ancient Rome (quite the custom, one might say). International dispute settlement is, by its very nature, a subject matter that combines and can benefit from many different repositories of moral, cultural and political knowledge-that is, many different intellectual discip- lines. No existing journal, I think, really reflects this yet. We will try to do just that. This extension to social sciences and the humanities most immediately translates into the approach and theme of this current issue of the Journal-a Special Issue on © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com . 1

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