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BOOK REVIEWS
508 NILR 2013
X. YANG, State Immunity in International Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012, clxxii + 761 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-84401-7. doi:10.1017/S0165070X12001398
The law of state immunity has developed primarily through litigation in domestic courtrooms around the globe. While the contours of the state immunity rule are by now largely set on the restrictive approach, domestic court practice shows that the interpretation and application of the rule differs signicantly across jurisdictions. Domestic judgments are State practice of particular signicance1 for the identication of custom in this area of law, but distilling international law from this far from general and consistent practice is a challenge, to say the least.
Xiaodong Yang bravely took on that challenge. In eleven chapters he takes us through the principal tenets of the law of state immunity (1. The history of State immunity; 2. General principles; 3. Commercial activity; 4. Contracts of employment; 5. Non-commercial torts; 6. Separate entities; 7. Expropriation; 8. Waiver of immunity; 9. Measures of constraint; 10. State immunity and human rights violations; 11. The genesis of the UN Convention). His book State Immunity in International Law is a rich study and a welcome and valuable addition to existing scholarship. The book unlocks an impressive amount of domestic case law, although the absence of OUPs International Law in Domestic Courts database from the sources is notable. That database holds judgments from jurisdictions absent from the table of cases in the book under review, and also many recent judgments that merit referencing. For example, when Yang explains that in Italy pecuniary claims in employment cases are generally not considered to infringe the sovereignty of the defendant state, the most recent case cited in support dates from 1993 (p. 176), while, also in view of the adoption of the (still to enter into force) UN Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and their Property in 2004, the conformation of this position in more recent jurisprudence is signicant.2 With a table of cases lling 120 pages, and references (almost all to domestic judgments) taking up almost 250 of the 760 pages of text, the book is nevertheless an invaluable catalogue for scholars and practitioners alike.
The book is however more than a collection of case law and other practice....