Aspects of International Law: From Interpretation to Law Making

• Author: Louis LeBel
• Position: Counsel, Langlois Lawyers; Former Justice, Supreme Court of Canada (2000-2014)
• Pages: 1-7

I

(2017) 3(1) CJCCL

Foreword

Aspects of International Law: From

Interpretation to Law Making

Louis LeBel

Counsel, Langlois Lawyers

Former Justice, Supreme Court of Canada (2000 - 2014)

Once again, the Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary

Law has published a collection of essays on important and sensitive

legal issues, this time in Public International Law. We owe this new

collection to the initiative of Professors Lorne Neudorf, Chris Hunt, and

Robert Diab and the Faculty of Law at ompson Rivers University.

Its title is simply “Problems of Interpretation in International Law”.

is modest title understates the importance of this collection. It does

not pretend, as a textbook might claim to do, to fully review the state

of the law. Rather, it opens views on the actual life of International Law.

It reviews a number of current dicult issues and looks ahead to the

developing future of International Law. It shows that interpretation

does not operate solely as a technique to elicit meaning from text. It

means more than that as it moves beyond this stage to discuss how

interpretation impacts on the creation of the law and on the sometimes

tense relationship between International Law and domestic legal systems.

is collection looks at International Law from the perspective of

legal interpretation. Such a topic is well known to lawyers, judges, and

academics everywhere in Canadian law. Nevertheless, the nature of legal

interpretation and of its core principles, even after Rizzo1 and the rise of

1. Rizzo & Rizzo Shoes Ltd, Re, [1998] 1 SCR 27.