Under what conditions do domestic actors use international legal mechanisms to influence domestic policy? Drawing on the European case, where legalization has progressed the furthest, I develop a generalizable framework for explaining variation in the use of the European Union's legal system by...

To what extent can the European Court of Justice, an international court, make decisions that go against the interests of European Union member states? Neofunctionalist accounts imply that because the Court is a legal body it has vast political autonomy from the member states, whereas neorealist...

Principal-Agent (P-A) theory sees the fact of delegation as defining a relationship be-tween states (collective Principals) and international organizations (Agents) with recon-tracting threats being the predominate way states influence IOs. Developing a category of Trustee-Agents, I argue that...