At the Nice Summit in December 2000, Europe's political leaders adopted the much-discussed EU Charter on Fundamental Rights in the form of a legally non-binding political declaration. It is the second such instrument in relation to human rights protection.1 The Presidency Conclusions to both the 1999 Cologne and Tampere Summits ordered the preparation of a draft Charter which was to be solemnly proclaimed by the European Parliament, the Commission and Council at the Nice Summit.2 It was only after that fact that “It will … have to be considered whether and, if so, how the Charter should be integrated into the treaties.”3

This article examines the extent to which EU and European human rights law, following the enactment of the European Communities Act 1972 and the Human Rights Act 1998, have changed the manner in which English courts use comparative law in the private law field. Despite legislative intervention rendering EU law part of the national legal system and requiring the courts ‘to take into account’ the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, there remains evidence that private law courts retain a preference for comparisons within the common law world. This article will examine, with reference to a number of recent empirical studies, the reasons for this position and what this signifies in terms of future comparative law reasoning.

Over a decade ago, an important debate began concerning the proper role of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in an international legal universe characterized by a large and rapidly increasing number of specialized courts and tribunals. What functions can and should the Court perform in response to the fragmentation of international law, and the proliferation of international tribunals? Initial proposals, especially those emerging in the late 1990s, were hierarchical and centralist in their orientation, and have justifiably fallen out of favour. This article uses the current international legal disputes about Australia's plain packaging tobacco legislation as the basis for an exploration of the possibilities for an alternative, non-centralist vision for the ICJ, which is sensitive both to the institutional limits of the international judiciary, and to the benefits of a fundamentally pluralist international legal order.