Foreign Relations Law

The first modern study of the law governing the external exercise of public power in the UK and the Commonwealth.

Campbell McLachlan (Author)

9780521728508, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 July 2016

664 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 3.5 cm, 0.95 kg

'McLachlan uses as an epigraph Lord Bridge's dictum in Ex parte Bennett [1994] 1 AC 42, 67, that '[t]o hold that the court may turn a blind eye to executive lawlessness beyond the frontiers of its own jurisdiction is, to my mind, an insular and unacceptable view', and in his book gives an extremely attractive account of why this ought to be so in principle, as well as analytically chronicling the development that Anglo-Commonwealth law has undergone in order to arrive at this position.' Eirik Bjorge, British Yearbook of International Law

What legal principles govern the external exercise of the public power of states within common law legal systems? Foreign Relations Law tackles three fundamental issues: the distribution of the foreign relations power between the organs of government; the impact of the foreign relations power on individual rights; and the treatment of the foreign state within the municipal legal system. Focusing on the four Anglo-Commonwealth states (the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), McLachlan examines the interaction between public international law and national law and demonstrates that the prime function of foreign relations law is not to exclude foreign affairs from legal regulation, but to allocate jurisdiction and determine applicable law in cases involving the external exercise of the public power of states: between the organs of the state; amongst the national legal systems of different states; and between the national and the international legal systems.

Part I. Sources: 1. Function
2. Development
3. Interaction between international and national law
Part II. The Foreign Relations Power: 4. Executive
5. Legislature
6. Judiciary
Part III. Foreign Relations and the Individual: 7. Civil claims against the State
8. Human rights claims
9. Diplomatic protection
Part IV. The Foreign State: 10. Personality and representation
11. The claimant State
12. The defendant State.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], International law [LB], Law [L]