ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter has a number of interrelated purposes. Firstly, it seeks to categorise the Commonwealth as a species of legal animal in the same way as political scientists might seek to categorise it as an international organisation or economists as an organisation for transregional development cooperation.1 This exercise raises the question of the extent to which the Commonwealth is governed by rules, norms or principles which lawyers will recognise. Does it function as a legal system for the resolution of disputes and for the enforcements by legal means of its ‘rules’? Secondly, the chapter explores the extent of cooperation in the legal field between member governments and between governments and Commonwealth legal professional associations. Thirdly, it examines the extent to which the Commonwealth still embodies a common legal tradition which, although it may be shared with other countries – including Ireland, the United States and even the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China,2 – has evolved a common law of the Commonwealth, which can absorb and encompass traditions of Islamic law, civil law, Roman-Dutch law as well as the ‘English’ common law.3 Thus the legal dimension of the Commonwealth may be perceived through the activities of the Commonwealth-wide legal community of judges, government law officers, legislators, private practitioners and academics, finding expression in the biennial Commonwealth Law Conferences and in the regular meetings of ministers, officials and the legal associations representing each segment of that community.4
