Summary

Although it is well known that apex or supreme court justices wield impressive, and at times awesome, interpretive powers and capacities for leadership and political and moral influence, this chapter specifically introduces the wider concept of adjudicatory leadership as a contribution to extending theories of global leadership. Adjudicatory leadership consists in the management and organization of the usual hierarchy of jurisdictions and court systems, and it also entails interpretive/hermeneutic leadership. This process now operates on a world scale. Indeed, courts and justices, rather than representative institutions, governments or political parties, have become, in many parts of the contemporary world, the mentors and mediators of the crisis of hegemony, particularly if they are understood as providing ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, to use Gramsci's phrase (Hoare and Nowell-Smith 1971: 57), as well as mediating and mentoring not just relationships between state and citizen but also social relations more generally. They are integral to the ‘general activity of the law’, which is ‘wider than purely the State and governmental activity’ and ‘includes the activity involved in directing civil society, in those zones which the technicians of law call legally neutral – i.e. in morality and in custom generally’, and thus to ‘the entire juridical problem’ (ibid.: 195). This ‘problem’ – as well as the crisis of hegemony – emerges in the contemporary moment as an aspect of the dialectic of constituted and insurgent power in the forging of public reason and progressive potentials of adjudicatory leadership.

Introduction: towards a theory of adjudicatory leadership

Adjudicatory leadership is as yet not a term of art, and its introduction into the discourse of constitutional, political and leadership theory may evoke contestation. Although pre-eminently an affair of national societies, it now extends considerably across national boundaries. The proliferation of international courts, tribunals and related forums remains truly unprecedented. Supranational forums, such as the European Union and judicial systems in Africa and Latin America, have produced novel adjudicatory leadership; so has the multicultural composition and functioning of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Although liable to critique as ‘victor's justice’, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials provide justifications for ad hoc tribunals in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, questioning international leadership patterns and forms of impunity that were able to thrive previously. The International Criminal Court (ICC) may finally now, besides having the jurisdiction to try war crimes and crimes against humanity, also tackle crimes of aggression, and may even address, in the remote future, the conduct of non-state actors, especially multinational corporations and allied entities for flagrant violations of human rights, human abuse, environmental degradation and ecological destruction. One may also add to this list the ongoing interpretive adjudicatory leadership, such as the United Nations human rights treaty bodies, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Human Rights Council, which have often, though not always, provided the space for counter-hegemonic contestation over the practices of the politics of cruelty, and much else as well, in terms of the amelioration of the lot of the worst off and rightless peoples.