Ordering Institutions: The Judicial Function of the Permanent Court of International Justice in Relation to Interwar Organizations

The Permanent Court played a vital role in the emergence of the law of international organizations. Existing accounts of this development focus on the Court’s conception of organizations. This paper argues that this interpretation underappreciates the controversy regarding the performance of the Permanent Court’s judicial function and its place within the inter-war institutional order. Crucially, it is claimed that initially the Permanent Court adopted the perspective of an authoritative interpreter, limiting the scope for recognising the autonomy of organizations. However, the Court began to adopt a more restrained conception of its judicial function and recognised that international organizations possessed a form of compétence de la compétence. This recognition paved the way for a ‘law of international organizations’ to emerge, but, crucially, was not based on any revised understanding of what it meant to ‘be’ an international organization, but rather, on what it meant to ‘be’ an international court.