Law Commons^™

The Normalization Of Foreign Relations Law, Ganesh Sitaraman, Ingrid Wuerth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The defining feature of foreign relations law is that it is distinct from domestic law. Courts have recognized that foreign affairs are political by their nature and thus unsuited to adjudication, that state and local involvement is inappropriate in foreign affairs, and that the President has the lead role in foreign policymaking. In other words, they have said that foreign relations are exceptional. But foreign relations exceptionalism, "the belief that legal issues arising from foreign relations are functionally, doctrinally, and even methodologically distinct from those arising in domestic policy,” was not always the prevailing view. In the early twentieth century, …