Andrew Legg, The Margin of Appreciation in International Human Rights Law: Deference and Proportionality

There is no dearth of works on the margin of appreciation: countless articles and a number of books have analysed its use in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as well as other international courts and tribunals, or have advocated it as a suitable judicial policy choice in contexts where it has not been adopted yet. In the book here under review, Andrew Legg is fully aware that he is revisiting well-trodden grounds, but his is nonetheless a welcome addition to the sprawling literature on the margin, a concept and technique of granting deference that will likely become more important, not less, with further growth in global governance arrangements. In a little over two hundred pages, Legg manages to provide a concise and compelling account of how the margin operates in the practice of three human rights supervisory bodies, the ECtHR, the Inter-American Court of Human...