Preface

In the age of online search engines, virtually all of international aviation law’s primary (and many secondary) materials are now only a few keyboard clicks away. Nevertheless, given the fact that international aviation law, particularly in its private dimension, is also bound up with more than 190 domestic legal systems, the sheer amount of documentation to be sifted through can quickly prove overwhelming to even the most curious and enterprising individual. Of course, there is nothing wrong with getting into the details, and for practitioners, it is a necessity; but without first having a sure guide to the whole terrain, it is all but impossible to find one’s way to the proper sources. With that in mind, The Principles and Practice of International Aviation Law is set primarily at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. By taking the reader from one end of international aviation law’s “cosmos” to the other (and all necessary points in between), we hope to satisfy the need for an overview before the detailed work of specialization begins.

As well as breadth of coverage, however, we seek also to give the reader a broader conceptual context for every area of international aviation law that we consider. Thus, on the public side, we present the regulatory structure of the international air transport industry against the backdrop of economic and political history as well as insights from general doctrines of public international law and from rational choice theory (Chapters 1, 2, and 3). We look at the highly charged issues of foreign investment in airlines and the emergence of global airline alliances by exposing the reader to the governing principles of modern international investment law (Chapter 4). We frame international safety and security issues in the wider context of the effectiveness of certain kinds of multilateral collaboration, and we analyze security issues in particular within current understandings of the nature of global piracy and evolving concepts of State criminal jurisdiction (Chapter 5). We examine the impact of climate change issues on the global aviation industry as part of the wider evolution of international environmental law (Chapter 6). On the private side, we scrutinize airline passenger and cargo liability law through lenses of corrective justice and the rise of consumerism (Chapter 7).