Goldilocks and International Dispute Settlement

In his lectures and scholarly writings, David Caron was fond of conjuring images. Last September, he opened a lecture in Geneva by recalling an inscription over an entrance to this law school. In his American Journal of International Law article on the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, he described a rather grim statue on the grounds of the Peace Palace in The Hague called The Spectre of War. These are sober images, befitting the serious topics that David addressed. The title of my presentation also brings to mind an image, but this image is that of little girl, the heroine of a children's story. I am not sure that David would have approved of this frivolity. In reading legal scholarship, I sometimes think of Goldilocks. On the one hand, some legal writings are by and for practitioners, and these can be very practical, detailed, and technical, but they often cover a topic without locating it in a larger frame.