Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law

www.mpeipro.com



A Periodic Publication Developed in Collaboration with Oxford University Press

In September 2019, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law (MPEiPro), edited by the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg, began being published online by Oxford University Press. The publication is accessible alongside the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (MPEPIL) at www.mpeipro.com.

The web-based format of MPEiPro offers:

  • A powerful search engine facilitating access to any topic;
  • Print-friendly PDFs available for each article;
  • Hyperlinked cross-references to other related entries.

This Encyclopedia is conceived of as a resource for practitioners, scholars, legal advisers, policy-makers and observers of international relations and global governance. It will be enriched each month with new in-depth manuscripts, eventually reaching over 1,000 articles.

Content Covered by MPEiPro

The scope of the Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law takes a broad notion of procedure that embraces decision-making by international organs in general, including political and administrative bodies whose purpose is not that of adjudicating or otherwise settling a dispute or a legal issue. However, the life cycle of the Encyclopedia has started with a focus on dispute settlement and adjudication, encompassing non-contentious and non-binding forms of international adjudication performed by public international law institutions, but also domestic and transnational ones, that is, all those institutions whose essential purpose is to lay down and/or apply rules of obvious international relevance. Later, the Encyclopedia will extend to non-adjudicatory modes of dispute settlement before tackling non-adjudicatory institutional decision-making processes.

The Encyclopedia makes available detailed accounts of key events, concepts and institutions, original research, rich historical contextualization, in-depth legal analyses, and critical assessments of existing practices and doctrines, integrating insights coming from other disciplines, like history, philosophy, sociology, international relations theory or anthropology. One very significant feature is the application of the comparative method of analysis in many of the entries.

Each Entry is an In-Depth Scientific Article

Rather than mere summaries, the so-called ‘entries’ making up MPEiPro are composed as detailed stand-alone scientific articles, which are rigorously researched and fully referenced. So far, more than 500 international experts in the field have agreed, upon invitation, to author signed scholarly entries of about 20 pages on both well-established and cutting-edge topics.

MPEiPro also profits from the wealth of expertise of its editors and reviewers, who supervise the coverage and content of each article and of the whole work. More than 70 experts from a wide variety of fields of law and from various geographic areas are contributing to the project by performing reviews. They form part of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Encyclopedia.

A Flagship Research Project of the Department of International Law and Dispute Resolution

Since the start of the project in 2015, Professor Hélène Ruiz Fabri has been directing MPEiPro and acts as General Editor. Under her guidance, the project seeks to map the field of international procedural law. Through this process, the Encyclopedia goes beyond gathering existing knowledge, and above all generates new subjects for reflection and innovative topics.

Therefore, the project substantially feeds the scientific activity of the Department of International Law and Dispute Resolution. Two spin-offs already developed at the department have been based on the work done on MPEiPro:

MPEiPro has been a collaborative project since the start. All of the researchers of the Department of International Law and Dispute Resolution contribute to the Encyclopedia project, which provides for all possible types of tasks and activities that researchers can learn from.