On September 9, 2016 our Visiting Professor Neus Torbisco-Casals published an article in the influential American international law blog, the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) Unbound, as part of the symposium on Nienke Grossman, Achieving Sex-Representative International Court Benches. Nienke Grossman offers an overview on the statistical pattern of the absence of women Judges in International Courts of Justice.
In response, Professor Neus Torbisco-Casals wrote on Why Fighting Structural Inequalities Requires Institutionalizing Difference where she argues that women’s persisting underrepresentation in international courts “is not just dysfunctional, but unfair, as it reveals a systemic pattern of sex inequality that needs to be corrected. Predominant legal interpretations of equality can hardly engage systemic forms of group disadvantage. Failure to develop mechanisms to correct gender imbalances might thus not be attributed to an oversight, but rather to the continuing force of a faulty conception of equality that should be revised. Tackling current sex imbalances in international court benches can be critical not just to achieve real equality between men and women, but also to further the integrity of judging as well as fundamental social and democratic values”.