Introducing Aviation Law in Its International Dimension

In his landmark casebook-treatise Aviation Law, Professor Andreas Lowenfeld set out to answer the challenge of his friend, Judge Henry Friendly, that there would only be value in giving the rules and regulations governing air transport separate treatment if “the heads of [the] given subject can be examined in a more illuminating fashion with reference to each other than with reference to other branches of law.” Despite Judge Friendly’s negative appraisal of the possibility, Lowenfeld prevailed. Aviation Law – expanded considerably with the publication of its second edition in 1981 – provided an integrated overview and analysis of the broad, and occasionally disparate, “heads” (e.g., economic, safety, and tort) of U.S. aviation law to a generation of students, practitioners, and academics before tumbling into obsolescence as its author abandoned further updates in favor of new research agendas. As the size and format of the book you currently hold in your hands (or have downloaded to your eReader) make apparent, The Principles and Practice of International Aviation Law is not a direct descendant of Lowenfeld’s work. It is not a thousand-page hybridization of scholarly treatise and casebook. Neither is it a recitation of the “black letter” of any single jurisdiction’s aviation law. Rather, what follows is a fully up-to-date critical introduction to aviation law in its international dimension that addresses those elements of national and inter-State legal and political cultures that continue to have the greatest impact on the development of international aviation law.