The Shifting Focus

Abstract

Firstly, any academic treatment of air law and policy should recognize that air law and space law are closely inter-related in some areas and that both these disciplines have to be viewed in the 21st century within the changing face of international law and politics. Both air law and space law are disciplines that are grounded on principles of public international law, which is increasingly becoming different from what it was a few decades ago. We no longer think of this area of the law as a set of fixed rules, even if such rules have always been a snapshot of the law as it stands at a given moment. Fundamentally, and at its core, international law was considered in simple terms as the law binding upon States in their relations with one another.1 A definition of international law was first given by the Provisional International Court of Justice in 1927 in the celebrated Lotus case when the World Court said: