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Commissions of Inquiry: Problems and Prospects, edited by Christian Henderson [Hart Publishing, Oxford and Portland, OR, 2017, 392pp, ISBN 9781782258766, £81.00 (h/bk)]

shown that this endeavour was not only non-justiciable but also unsuccessful, given India’s conflicts with Pakistan and its limited commitment to non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. For the EuropeanUnion—with limited potential for disrupting world order—the prime objectives are security, the promotion of its own values and the upholding of its ‘interests’. There is no limiting of pursuit of these objectives to civilian methods or even to ethical goals, but the central objective of ‘coherence’, the requirement to help to develop as well as to apply international law and the rigorous procedural requirements before any effective action can be taken has ensured a benign outcome. This is an intensely thought-provoking book, and the analysis of a wide range of theories and literature is rigorous and impressive. The reader is, however, left with a desire for more thorough exploration of how the wide range of constitutional objectives at both national and EU level have actually been applied in order to condition foreign policy actions and in judicial challenges. More detail on national cases—such as the 2011 judgment of the Indian Supreme Court (at 62)—would help the reader to assess the differencemade to the outcome by the invocation of India’s commitment to international peace. Some of the cases at European level leave the impression that challenges to a proposed external action are motivated more by a power struggle between the institutions of the European Union than by any perception that they may contravene fundamental constitutional objectives. The extensive groundwork contained in this comparative research may pave the way for rigorous testing of the relevance of the shared foreign policy objectives to the actions—both successful and unsuccessful—which the Union has undertaken under the constitutional powers it now has to conduct a common foreign policy. It must also be recalled that constitutional provisions may inhibit rational change—the prohibition in the Japanese constitution of recourse to war and the US constitutional guarantee of the right of the citizen ‘to keep and bear arms’ are examples of current concern. There may be little correlation between uplifting foreign policy objectives in a national or international constitution and mayhem or carnage on the ground. The Constitution of South Sudan whose splendid foreign policy ambitions are quoted at length in the penultimate page of Larik’s book is a dismal reminder of this.