Meanwhile, the world’s phobic apprehension of the Court is wondrously at odds with their approach to its second role—rendering advice. While it is often asserted that this role serves purely academic purposes, commentators have argued correctly that the ICJ is no research center. The UN organs can recruit any body of lawyers to dispense of this role. More than just once, the Security Council has provided ground for allegations of intentionally abusing the formula, and indeed the moral authority of the Court, so as to reprimand states in a round-about way over issues these countries would never submit to contentious review. The highly politically charged request for an opinion concerning the Austro-German Customs Union in 1931 was perhaps the first in an alarming series. Recently, the requests for opinions on the use of nuclear weapons or on Israel’s security wall invoked similar criticism. In all fairness one should say that, when put to the test, the ICJ rang true. While observing due judicial restraint, it rarely succumbed to political pressure.

But one must conclude that, for all the expansion of international organization, the structural progress made in the sphere of international adjudication has been fairly limited. Witness to this is the fate of that trouvaille of the 1920s, the “optional clause”—an ultimate effort to enwrap some compulsory element in the judicial process by luring countries into accepting the Court’s jurisdiction beforehand on the basis of reciprocity and on stipulated issues and terms. Welcomed by internationalists as a panacea, the magic spell failed to charm the world of high politics. Perhaps lawyers were deluded into relying on the gradual acceptance of this device to stand at the mercy of state opportunism. Recent sociopolitical and geopolitical change worldwide pose new challenges to the ICJ, no less than to the Westphalian system itself. No longer can states be credited as the sole actors in the international arena. Inter-state conflict is no longer the primary threat to world peace. In response, the ICJ’s cramped mandate and inflexible statute urgently needs revision, so as not to marginalize the institution and erode the role of international law. Various propositions to that end have been made in recent years, including attributing the role of judicial review to the ICJ and having the ICJ act as the supreme court of an integrated system of legal orders.

There is yet another urgent reason for a fundamental review of the current role of the ICJ. Over the past decades, the number of regional courts and tribunals has multiplied with paramount impact within the EU region, but with modest success elsewhere so far. International adjudication presents itself, at least to the layman, as an ever-expanding, hierarchically diffuse, partly overlapping but essentially incoherent fabric. States can be relied upon to lose no time in availing themselves of this predicament of the law and challenge the homogeneity of the patchwork by smart “forum-shopping.” It is time for representatives of the judiciary, national and international, throughout the world, in jeopardy of becoming the slumbering sentinels of justice, to seriously reflect upon the less than perfect global fabric of the law. To let bygone ideals be bygone, abolish atavisms as between the national and international legal orders, and, in concert, update procedures, fine-tune competences, tailor-make answers to both power politics and terrorism, and bring the various organs in line. In short, to preserve the unity and enhance the appeal of the law so as to more patently and effectively address this world’s urgent needs.