Preface to the third edition

• Author: Gib van Ert
• Pages: 23-24

Preface to the third

edition

e basic principles governing t he application and non-application of

public international law in t he Canadian legal system h ave not changed

in the  years since the second edition of this work was published.

It would be surprising i f they had, for those principles have governed

the reception of international law i n Westminster-model states such as

Canada for longer than there has been a Canada to receive them. e

structure of th is book is therefore unchanged from the second edition.

Yet much of the book is new. Every chapter has been revised, a nd

most have been considerably expanded. I have made t hese revisions

with three goals.

My rst goal was to bring t he book up to date. Since the second edi-

tion appeared in , the princ iples it described have been considered,

armed, and appl ied by the Supreme Court of Canada i n such cases as

Nemeth v Canada (Justice),  SCC ; Kazemi Estate v Iran,  SCC

; Oce of the Children’s Lawyer v Balev,  SCC ; Canada (Minister of

Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov,  SCC ; Nevsun Resources Ltd

v Araya,  SCC ; and Quebec (Attorney General) v - Québec

inc,  SCC . I have worked these authorities, and many more from

the Supreme Court and lower courts across the country, into this new

edition – sometimes simply slotting them in where they belong and

sometimes rewriting whole sec tions to account for them.

My second goal has been to move the narrative somewhat away

from its previous treatment of English authorities. In the rst and

second editions, I made a modest eort to address not only the Eng-

lish legal-historical origins of our reception ru les but also their con-

tinued currency in modern UK law. In this edition I continue to oer

xxiii