This compilation of the author's 2001 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures at Cambridge provides a comprehensive overview of the methods and modes of international dispute settlement. Included in the broad survey are the central public and private dispute resolution processes at the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), regional arrangements, national jurisdictions and private party-to-party arrangements. The book achieves its stated goal of identifying trends and provoking discussion of ways in which international dispute resolution can be improved, and in the process has created a useful primer on transnational dispute settlement for social scientists. The lectures have been supplemented with footnotes and the book includes a comprehensive bibliography that includes most of the important recent works in the international law literature on dispute resolution. The strength of the volume lies in its discussion of private dispute resolution and its interplay with public institutions, an area that is often ignored or played down in political science literature focused on state-to-state legal arrangements and interstate relations.

Vicuña's analysis is informed by his experience as a judge and arbitrator adjudicating disputes on permanent courts and as part of ad hoc commissions and tribunals. In many ways Vicuña's own career has tracked the central trends he describes in the book: the explosion in the past two decades of private and public international dispute settlement mechanisms and the corresponding evolution in international law toward permitting individuals and corporations direct access to those mechanisms without the traditional intermediation of the state. Vicuña's work is most effective when describing these trends and their limits and the broader challenges they pose for the development of law and the traditional role of states in the international legal system.

To Vicuña, international dispute resolution is neither a purely vertical process involving the application of law over and above states, nor a purely horizontal process in which state-to-state interactions are central. Verticality—where states give up some degree of volition over how rules apply to them—is the exception, existing, more or less, solely in the European Union. But at the same time, states confer limited powers on international institutions and have agreed to participate in dispute resolution systems (e.g., ICSID, the World Trade Organization) that limit their sovereignty and increase direct access to non-state actors. International dispute resolution is thus evolving as something between horizontal and vertical processes. The emerging challenges of the international system reflect this process: the problems of a decentralized legal system, (lack of uniformity and conflicting interpretations and applications of international law) and those of a centralized system with no constitution or central political authority (lack of political consensus or democratic legitimacy).

One way Vicuña proposes to address the absence of a centralized authority to determine the content of international rules is through constitutionalization. Constitutionalization, absent a global constitution, could be achieved through expansion of the ICJ's compulsory jurisdiction, and its advisory opinion function, to include, for example, advising on the duties of the UN secretary general. Recognizing that a decision by the UN member states to confer such powers on the ICJ is highly unlikely, Vicuña suggests creating a new constitutional court, with connections to regional political organization and authority to “decide on the meaning and extent of fundamental principles and questions of interpretation, submitted by states and other entities” (28). However, Vicuña does little to convince the reader of the necessity of such a court to solve the current challenges of legitimacy in international rule making, not to mention the extreme unlikelihood of such a proposal garnering widespread support. What role, for example, could such a court play in resolving the current differences in interpretation of rules governing how and when to employ armed force? What would be the effect on such a court of a decision by a large power not to participate in it (as is the case with the United States and the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ)? How could such a court, conceived as a substitute for central constitutional authority, be any more effective in ensuring compliance with its own decisions than the ICJ?

Indeed, the bulk of the book discusses the efficacy of the emergence of flexible—and, in some cases, decentralized—institutional responses to the need for adjudicatory bodies empowered to state what the law is. In many ways, these flexible insitutions undermine the stated utility of a centralized court. The rules for access of individuals to dispute resolution in the trade-in-goods context (for example, the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding, which allows only state parties to bring complaints, and relies on internal state processes to determine when and how to bring forth those claims where domestic constituencies have complained of harm) have emerged quite differently from those governing foreign direct investment (for example, NAFTA Chapter 11, which confers standing on individuals to bring direct claims against a state party). But the rules do appear to reflect what the participants in the system agree to be effective tools for disputes over trade and investment.

Vicuña's discussion of the role of individuals is broken into three parts: settlement of claims and governing rules; individual standing before international courts; and specialized or ad hoc jurisdictions. While individuals are now deemed to be subjects of individual law, Vicuña discusses the unsettled questions involving the extent to which individuals have the “capacity to exercise [] rights and to be held responsible for their duties in the international legal system” (29). The rights and obligations of individuals can only be realized through the conferral of standing to assert claims, which in turn requires a tribunal or other adjudicatory authority before which to bring the claim. Traditionally, individuals had been limited in doing so through states, which served as intermediaries, in effect transforming the claim into a claim of right by the state against another actor. But the “diplomatic protection” function of states, through which states act on behalf of their own nationals (including corporations deemed to be nationals), has diminished, replaced by increasing options for individuals to pursue their own claims. The trend is dominant in the international human rights instruments and institutions (for example, the ad hoc tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the International Criminal Court) and has expanded to play a significant role in the settlement of economic and business claims as well.

Vicuña discusses in some detail the rules governing the nationality of claims, when claims may flow from a state to its nationals, and the ways in which nationality may affect the availability of remedies. He proposes that traditional “diplomatic protection” should be used as a gap-filler or as a residual mechanism, as it represents discretionary political acts of the state, with the potential consequence of cutting off potential remedies. Corporations with diffuse multinational ownerships demonstrate how the application of traditional notions of nationality can complicate jurisdictional questions. Vicuña suggests introducing the international registration of corporations (following the example of international registration of trademarks) to reduce conflicting claims of nationality. In proposing an elegant legal solution, however, Vicuña ignores the complex domestic politics underlying the persistence of state diplomacy as a tool for promoting corporate interests, which can at times outweigh the desire for uniform rules. While beyond the scope of this book, the question of the persistence of diplomatic interference on behalf of private actors—even where legal options exist—raises important questions about the nature and limits of legalizing international economic behaviour.

The enduring feature of international dispute settlement is its largely voluntary nature. States and other actors may in theory opt to participate in the various processes, whether centralized or decentralized, private or public. That they are volitional in theory, however, is increasingly undermined by the overwhelming practicality of participating in, for example, the WTO, multilateral or bilateral mechanisms to resolve cross-border investment disputes, and supranational or regional human rights regimes. Vicuña recognizes that as these processes deepen and broaden, the gap between how disputes are resolved and the ability of those availing themselves of the processes to participate in writing the rules has become a central challenge. To political scientists examining the effects of these changes in dispute resolution on the behaviour of states and non-state actors, the questions posed in this book provide some insight into how international lawyers currently think about these issues.