The Acquisition of Territory in International Law

This book challenges the myths surrounding the Irish Free Constitution by analysing the document in its context, by looking at how the Constitution was drafted and elucidating the true nature of the document. It examines the reasons why the Constitution did not function as anticipated and investigates whether the failures of the document can be attributed to errors of judgment in the drafting process or to subsequent events and treatment of the document.

As well as giving a comprehensive account of the drafting stages and an analysis of the three alternative drafts for the first time, the book considers the intellectual influences behind the Constitution and the central themes of the document.

This work constitutes a new look at this historic document through a legal lens and the analysis benefits from the advantage of hindsight as well as the archival material now available.

Given the fact that the current Constitution substantially reproduces much of the 1922 text, the work will be of interest to modern constitutional scholars as well as legal historians and anyone with an interest in the period surrounding the creation of the Irish State.

The increasing commercialisation of sport raises important questions concerning regulation. The development of the European Union (EU) and the internationalization of sporting competition have added an international dimension to this debate. Yet sport is not only a business, it is a social and cultural activity. Can regulation at the EU level reconcile this tension? Adopting a distinctive legal and political analysis, this book argues that the EU is receptive to the claim of sport for special treatment before the law. It investigates the birth of EU sports law and policy by examining the impact of the Bosman ruling and other important European Court of Justice decisions, the relationship between sport and EU competition law, focusing particularly on the broadcasting of sport, the organization of sport and the international transfer system, and the relationship between sport and the EU Treaty, focusing in particular on the impact of the Amsterdam and Nice declarations on sport and the significance of the Helsinki report on sport. This text raises questions concerning the appropriate theoretical tools for analysing European integration.

This book presents a message that there is no effective international legal order to restrain the unilateralism of States. It provides the basic reasons which make unilateralism inevitable. States owe their existence to a matter of historical fact and do not have their statehood conceded to them by a higher authority. The book underlines that it is essential for the discipline of international law to recognise that international society consists of frightened 'independent States', embroiled in an anxiety-ridden drive to secure their own existence, while enveloping themselves in the 'lawfare' of the value nihilism which underlies modern legal positivism. The wider context is a commitment to a classical ontology of natural law and to a more usual understanding of decadence, whether of international law or anything else. The book deconstructs the illusory fabric of an international legal community supposedly resting in a common consciousness of a customary international law. International law doctrine asks us to imagine that States have a juridical conscience (an opinion juris) which evolves historically, as they become aware of how their repeated conduct reflects a juridical conviction that this conduct is required by Law. This view of international law as rooted finally in custom is an illusion of nineteenth-century legal historicism which was already bankrupt by 1914, with the disintegration of European civilisation in the Great War.