Articles

• Carrillo-Santarelli, Nicolás
• Espósito, Carlos

Abstract

National judges are increasingly exposed to deciding on issues regulated by the international legal system, given its expansion and specialization. However, this is just one of the many ways in which national judges interact with international law: they have the potential not only to receive and take into account international law, but also to shape and contribute to its modification, acting alone or in conjunction with other judicial authorities, and considering or ignoring the interests of several actors. The attitude of judges towards international norms, in the reception and modification dimensions, depends on a variety of factors worth exploring in detail. Such exploration allows us to ascertain how and when judges are more prone to protecting legal goods enshrined by international norms. The fact that national judges are empowered by a domestic legal system to act, while generating tensions and paradoxes when norms created in different levels of governance clash, does not detract from the possibility for them to defend interests and values, i.e., legal goods, belonging to other legal systems, even those generated in a global space of interaction where interests and values shared by different legal systems are shaped, including the protection of human dignity.