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-à-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.