Conflict of Norms - Conflict of Laws - Conflict of Systems? On the Conditions of Normative Conflict in International Law

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When talking of normative conflicts or interface conflicts, much legal literature focuses on possible solutions, i.e., how conflicts between different norms and/or regimes ought to be resolved. A range of options exists to address this question: some claim that a maximum of harmonization through interpretation ought to be achieved; others argue that there is a need to develop secondary norms that tell us how a conflict might be resolved; still others believe that any attempt to conceive of international law as a unitary system is futile and advocate for either loose coordination or explicit political contestation. Our project is not primarily concerned with normative solutions to interface conflicts. Rather, it takes a step back and looks at how normative conflicts are constructed by independent third-party actors. Our guiding intuition is that there is no necessity in understanding a certain coincidence of norms as a normative or interface conflict. Perhaps the same constellation is sometimes seen as a conflict and sometimes not. Throughout the project, we intend to examine a wide range of judicial and quasi-judicial decisions with a view to better understanding under which conditions a latent interface conflict in a given situation materializes into a manifest interface conflict. Put differently, we ask: Under which conditions do third-party actors address latent interface conflicts, and what are their argumentative strategies in either solving or avoiding them? We intend to scrutinize the rationale provided by various third-party actors in establishing or rejecting the existence of an interface conflict. Through this approach, the project seeks to establish a typology of possible interface conflicts in international law that accounts for its contingency. We will limit our inquiry to interface conflicts on the horizontal level, i.e., between legal regimes that claim potential global applicability (e.g., multilateral treaty regimes and customary international law), and we will examine third-party involvement, courts and quasi-judicial bodies, in the identification and resolution of such conflicts.