The 2016 James Crawford Prize for International Dispute Settlement, awarded by the Journal of International Dispute Settlement and Oxford University Press, goes to Dr Pietro Ortolani, of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg, for his paper The Three Challenges of Stateless Justice.

The paper argues that if we want to obtain a meaningful understanding of the rapidly emerging systems of stateless justice, which operate within private autonomous legal orders, we need to take up three core challenges: clarify the relationship between justice and authority without falling prey to our state-centrist habits; work out the appropriate structures of the processes; and determine what the essential functions of justice are and how they can be fulfilled by stateless systems. Using Bitcoin as a case study, the article develops a new epistemic model to understand justice outside of the state – a model divorced from the theoretical framework of state authority.

It will be published on the journal’s website by the end of April, and included in print in the journal’s third issue for 2016.

Many congratulations to Dr Ortolani.