Using International Law in UK Courts

Abstract International law has become a fixture before the courts of the United Kingdom (UK). But how is it actually used and how does this use relate to its means of reception into domestic law? Scholarship has tended to focus on how judges interpret and apply international law, to the exclusion of how it is deployed by litigants. In doing so, it also overlooks the relationship between the way an international norm is received into domestic law and its use in court. This article asks whether there are differences in the kinds of international law readily available to different litigants and how this plays out in the cut and thrust of domestic litigation—whether it is used as a sword or a shield, on the basis of domestic statute or the common law and what kinds of arguments are run in the absence of domestic footholds. This raises a broader point about the politics of statutory transposition, the practice of argument and the difficulties of litigating unincorporated international law.