The Nature of International Law and the Interpretation of International Air Transport Treaties: Focusing on the Emirates Case before the UK Royal Courts of Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Treaties are a core source of international law, and this centrality is equally evident in the field of air transport. However, the complex and multilateral contractual relationships characteristic of air transport require a distinct interpretive approach. Traditional jurisprudential theories—legal positivism and natural law—provide important foundations but reveal limitations when applied to the interpretation of air transport treaties. Legal positivism, especially Kelsen’s pure theory, emphasizes strict adherence to legal texts and facts, yet often fails to address evolving consumer protection needs. Natural law theory, grounded in immutable moral principles, struggles to accommodate the commercial realities and stakeholder conflicts inherent in international air carriage. This paper proposes interpretivism as a more effective framework for treaty interpretation in air transport law. Through analysis of the Emirates case before the UK Royal Courts of Justice, the study demonstrates how interpretivism, by integrating textual analysis with normative coherence and practical considerations, resolves conflicts between instruments such as the Montreal Convention and Regulation 261. This approach not only aligns with the object and purpose principle of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties but also supports a dynamic and consumer-oriented development of air law. The findings suggest that interpretivist reasoning can guide future legal reforms and judicial practice in the protection of air passengers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".