‘Something like the principles of British liberalism’: Ivor Jennings and the international and domestic, 1920–1960

Abstract

While the relationship between domestic and international law provoked constant debate among European jurists in the interwar years, British thinking is remembered as orthodoxly dualist and practice-focused. Complicating this narrative, this article revisits W Ivor Jennings’ work, arguing that the domestic and international were central to his understandings of interwar legal change in the imperial and international communities. Part 1 examines Jennings’ seemingly forgotten 1920s works, which analysed constitutional and international interactions within the rapidly changing imperial system. Part 2 explores Jennings’ turn to international and domestic forms of the rule of law in the lead-up to war, emphasising their British liberal heritage. Part 3 shows how these conceptions, and their imperial connections, echoed in Jennings’ post-war projects: a European federation modelled on the empire; and lectures to decolonising states. This reveals both new angles to Jennings’ work and the importance of the domestic and international for constitutional legacies of empire.