The International Court of Justice as a discursive actor: mapping self-legitimation in ICJ jurisprudence

The chapter adopts an interdisciplinary approach to explore the discursive self-legitimation strategies of the International Court of Justice analysing the Court’s judgments through a rhetorical, rather than a legal, lens. The Chapter draws on a linguistic framework to develop a novel method to map variation in the degree of self-legitimation in court judgments, before employing automated methods of text classification to explore such variations in a dataset of judgments issued by the International Court of Justice in the period 1996-2016. It finds, inter alia, that while the Court on average has spent more efforts legitimating its findings and conclusions in disputes involving wealthy and powerful states, overall its legitimation efforts have declined over time. With this, and alongside its other findings, the Chapter adds weight to the argument that court officials behave strategically when drafting judgments and adds new insights to our understanding of judicial behaviour.