Foreign Legal Policy As the Background to Foreign Relations Law?

Abstract

The study of foreign relations law has been largely devoted to domestic laws as they affect foreign policy. An element seems to be missing, however, somewhere between domestic and international law that is reducible to neither the constraints of domestic or international law on foreign policy. Although that element may simply be the national interest, the latter seems too crude a variable to explain alone how countries navigate not just their foreign policy generally, but its many legal dimensions specifically. A more discreet strand of thought has looked at how national policies in relation to international law are formulated. This could be seen as including the quite specific but rich genre of writing on foreign policy legal advice and advisors (which has both a foreign policy law allocation dimension, and a foreign legal policy element) although what this chapter is interested in is arguably broader and not necessarily as personalised. The key intuition here is