The Constitution and Foreign Affairs

Speaker: Professor Thomas Poole (London School of Economics)
Chair: Professor Dapo Akande (University of Oxford)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2015-16

About the lecture

We have a blindspot when it comes to the constitutional implications of foreign affairs.

Events in this sphere tend to fall into one of two gaps: between domestic public law and international law, or between law and politics.

Courts experience problems in categorising the cases that arise: they fall within the sphere of the prerogative (whatever quite that is) or are treated as ‘political questions’.

The situation is compounded by the absence of a written constitution, which tends to specify a foreign relations power.

Two developments make this lacuna increasingly problematic. First, the significant increase in cases invoking the foreign relations power.

Since 9/11 in particular, the courts are very frequently being asked to judge matters relating to the expression of state power abroad, whether in its ‘hard’ form (e.g. the deployment of armed force) or in ‘softer’ forms (e.g. the bribery of foreign officials).

Second, the density of international and transnational law that now exists makes it harder to conceptualise this extra-territorial space as one in which law has no real jurisdiction.

Exploring the dramatic juridical landscape produced by such cases as Belmarsh, Bancoult, Corner House, Noor Khan, Belhaj, Abbasi, Binyam Mohamed and other Guantanamo Bay cases.

This lecture draws on both historical and comparative sources to offer a coherent and normatively engaged account of the emerging public law principles governing the exercise of the foreign relations power.

About the speaker

Thomas studied at University College London, the University of Oxford and Manchester University. Before coming to the LSE in 2006, he taught at the University of Nottingham.

He has held visiting professorships at the University of New South Wales (2003-6), the European University Institute (2007), the University of Toronto (2008), Princeton University (2008-9) and the Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas (2013-5).

Tom is an articles editor at the Modern Law Review.

Thomas writes on public law and constitutional theory. He is author of Reason of State: Law, Prerogative and Empire (Cambridge, 2015) and co-editor of Hobbes and the Law (Cambridge, 2012) and Law, Liberty and State: Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2015), both with David Dyzenhaus.

His next book, The Law Lords and Human Rights (Oxford University Press), written with Sangeeta Shah and Michael Blackwell, comes out in Summer 2016.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues.

It covers all areas of legal sponsorship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

Find out more about CLP on the Oxford University Press website