The Engagement of Domestic Courts with International Law Comparative Perspectives

This book advances and develops a new paradigm for describing, assessing, and understanding the role of domestic courts in the international legal order. This new paradigm is one of pragmatic engagement, replacing the older, binary, and doctrinal paradigms of monism and dualism. The book is driven by two parallel trends. On the one hand, the traditional dividing lines between national and international law norms and institutions have become increasingly blurred. On the other hand, the practice of domestic courts can less and less be understood by reference to a formal approach that dictates how national legal orders receive international law. The solutions that courts reach are often based on a variety of other considerations that are not captured by the classical formal models. The aim of the book is to bring together the wide variety of types of engagement, as an important step towards a better understanding of what courts do and, eventually, towards a normative exercise of articulating principles or guidelines for the engagement of domestic courts with international law. To bring together the pragmatic approaches of domestic courts, the International Law Association Study Group on Principles on the Engagement of Domestic Courts with International Law engaged in studies with experts from a variety of different jurisdictions. On the basis of the Study Group’s Final Report, the editors of this book continued to work with experts from different jurisdictions to collect and analyse different pragmatic forms of engagement by domestic courts. This book contains the outcome of this process