This study considers the ftrst century of international adjudication as
a permanent fixture of the international society. By using speciftc
international courts to which I was attached, as either a researcher or
an employee, I was allowed to consider the various limitations to
effective adjudication on the international plane. I recall the day in
January of 1992 when the seeds of this manuscript were ftrst planted. I
was on the fourth-floor of the Loeb Building at Carleton University
leafing through a copy of Thomas Burgenthal's International Human Rights
Law in a Nutshell when I came upon a chapter on the Inter-American Court
of Human Rights. "How could this be?", I thought. "A little known human
rights court in a part of the world fraught with human rights abuses".
That semester, I followed through on a course in international human
rights law with Professor Maureen Davies and accepted a University
Fellowship to do graduate work at Brock University (Canada) the
following year. Supported in my interest by Professor James Patrick
Sewell, I sought and received an Organization of American States
Fellowship to spend an academic year studying the Inter- American Court
of Human Rights, in situ, in San Jose, Costa Rica. It is from this
period that I witnessed ftrst-hand how the Inter-American Court,
although similar on paper to the European Court of Human Rights, was
limited in its effectiveness through the lack of ftnancing and stafftng
allocated to it by American States.
