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114 Am. J. Int'l L. 545 (2020)
Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice

handle is hein.journals/ajil9114 and id is 586 raw text is: RECENT BOOKS ON INTERNATIONAL LAW Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice. By Karen J. Alter and Laurence R. Helfer. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxiv, 308. Index. doi:10.1017/ajil.2020.28 If recent years have not witnessed a significant increase in the number of international courts,1 there has been a welcome increase in the academic attention paid to the activity of these courts.2 This attention raises questions not only about the dynamics of these courts, but wider ones about international law. Most of these courts are in the Global South. If they afford international law a wider vocal range, the nature of this contribution is still a mystery. These courts also raise important questions about the style, depth, and breadth of international institutionalization. Their spread has not been as extensive or as unproblematic as was perhaps promised by the initial expansion of these courts, particularly in the 1990s, with strong pushback against particular courts.3 The wonderful monograph co-written by Karen Alter, professor of political science and law at Northwestern University, and Laurence Helfer, professor of law at Duke University School of Law, captures these fault lines. In the The most recent of note was established back in 2015, the Court of the Eurasian Economic Union. Treaty on Eurasian Economic Union, Art. 19, Annex 2 (2014). 2 For collections, see THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL ADJUDICATION (Cesare P. R. Romano, Karen J. Alter & Yuval Shany eds., 2013); Karen J. Alter, Laurence R. Helfer & Mikael Rask Madsen, The Variable Authority ofInternational Courts, 79 L. & CONTEMP. PROBS. (2016); INTERNATIONAL COURT AUTHORITY (Karen Alter, Laurence Helfer & Mikael Madsen eds., 2018). See also Cesare P. R. Romano, Review Essay, Legitimacy, Authority, and Performance: Contemporary Anxieties of International Courts and Tribunals, 114 AJIL 149 (2020). 3 A central concern of the United Kingdom govern- ment in its negotiations with the European Union on the terms of its departure from the latter was that the European Court of Justice should have no future juris- diction over it. The South African Development Community Tribunal was disbanded in 2012 follow- ing a controversy regarding a 2008 judgment challeng- ing the lack of legal process surrounding Zimbabwe's land reforms. best tradition of a case study, one learns a lot from it about the law and politics of an interna- tional organization, the Andean Community, and its court, the Andean Tribunal of Justice (Tribunal). The monograph also generates a range of significant, more widely generalizable insights that, for this reviewer at least, provoke reflection and doubt about the prospects of inter- national courts. Before engaging with these, a few tributes are necessary. This book is a beautifully written account of the Tribunal. It achieves sig- nificant resonance through weaving together a story of judicial biographies, litigant stories, and analyses of particular judgments. It eschews the simple narrative of reducing the story of the Tribunal to a single independent variable, cap- turing, instead, the variety of factors that affect the court's authority and case law. Finally, this reviewer has spent time researching in both South America and South East Asia and has had to endure the frustrations of primary materi- als being much less accessible than in Europe or North America. In that context, the range and rigor of the research underpinning this study is something to behold. It is legal research at its most daring and most intellectually inquisitive. The Andean Community is a story of a regional integration that struggles but endures. Established in 1969 by the Treaty of Cartagena, two of its most economically signifi- cant members, Chile and Venezuela, have left. Four members-Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru-remain. The limited faith in it has resulted in Bolivia being in the process of acces- sion to the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR for its Spanish initials),4 and Colombia and Peru acceding to the Pacific Alliance.5 The Andean Community has not real- ized its goal of a customs union. 4 The MERCOSUR was established by the Treaty of Asuncion in 1991 to create a common market between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Venezuela acceded in 2013, but its membership was suspended in 2016 because of its democratic failings. A Protocol of Accession was signed for Bolivian membership in 2015, but it has still not been ratified by all national legislatures. 5 The Pacific Alliance was established by a Presidential Declaration in 2011 between Chile, 2020 545

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