Not being a legal scholar, I will focus my concluding remarks on the more philosophical and historical aspects of this fascinating and important debate: issues that are especially prominent in the two opening chapters of this collection, but which illuminate and ground all of the chapters in this book.

The debate is triggered by the political developments of the last few decades, vaguely labelled ‘globalisation’. Of greatest relevance for this volume are the aspects of globalisation that concern the relationship of international law on the one hand to public law within each state on the other – and, particularly, how that relationship is instantiated and informed by the development of international sanctions regimes. Traditionally, these two areas of the law, public international and domestic public, have been separate; the latter determined by domestic legislative processes and the former by the treaty-making powers of (the more powerful) sovereign states.

The word ‘separate’ here means, in the first instance, that there was little overlap between these bodies of law, that is, few cases that substantively involved either elements of both national and international law or legal rules from two distinct national jurisdictions. These bodies of law governed in separate spheres, and their main contact consisted in a shared recognition of this division of labour along with deference by each to the rules and judgments promulgated by the others. The word ‘separate’ does not mean that these bodies of law did not affect one another's content.