The United States and Yhe World Court as a "Supreme Court of the Nations": Dreams, Illusions and Disillusion

The hope that international adjudication will some day come to replace international aggression has long been a fond aspiration of mankind, and nowhere, perhaps, has it taken firmer root than in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court has been held up as a model for the successful adjudication of interstate disputes and for the evolution of a body of revered legal norms. Yet America's own record "vis-a-vis" international adjudication and the International Court has been marked by ambivalence and a sharp dichotomy between rhetoric and deeds. Integrating legal and historical materials and insights, Professor Pomerance examines in this volume the troubled saga of the U.S. pursuit of the Supreme Court of the Nations' idea, from its early pre-World War I origins through the present post-"Nicaragua" period of U.S. reserve, disillusionment and reassessment. Spurning a morality-play' interpretive mold, the author pays particular attention to recurrent themes and the roots of their recurrence; the specific cadences and nuances in the grand' and lesser U.S. debates on the Court; the continuities and changes in "both" partners of the U.S.-Court relationship; and the various prisms through which that relationship might be viewed. In this manner, the important contemporary debate on the future contours of the U.S.-Court nexus is sharply illuminated.