Law, Adjudication, and the “Experiment of International Administration” (1920–1946)

The claim that international courts are a necessary precondition for the existence of international law rests on a more general assumption that the way a legal order is institutionalised determines the character of law within that legal order. This article explores the underlying structural association between institution form and the quality of law in the context of the “experiment of international administration”: the concentration, monopolisation and transformation of international authority in the aftermath of the First World War. By examining neglected sites of legal activity, in particular the Advisory Committee on the Traffic of Women and Children and the Permanent Mandates Commission, the article argues that an interwar “administrative turn” opened up new terrain for heterogeneous forms of international legal discourse.