text: The attorney general's legal opinion before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 resulted from a failure to understand the American attitude to law in general, and international law in particular, and a confusion between advice and advocacy.
  The American legal mind regards law not as a thing that gets applied but as a process that never stops. In the British tradition, and still more in the European tradition, judges (and hence legal advisers) are strongly constrained to make sophisticated choices among possible views of the law, while respecting a structure which we regard as containing the existing state of the law.
  The American view of international law is familiar to all international lawyers. It regards international law as a thing that is created pragmatically through a dialogue of conflicting international interests. The American legal opinion that Lord Goldsmith heard from White House and state department lawyers, which caused him to refocus his own opinion, will certainly have reflected the idea that international law is what the government thinks it should best be understood to be, on the assumption that other governments are fully entitled to take another view and to work to have that view adopted.
  The job of an advocate is to win cases. The job of an adviser is to be right. To regard the government as a client is correct when the attorney general is called on to act for the government in litigation. It is not correct when his role is to advise in advance of a serious decision.
  Philip Allott
  Professor emeritus of international ­public law, Cambridge University
  Both the United Nations charter and customary international law did forbid the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The only things that permitted it were the misguided intentions of Bush and Blair and the fact that the erstwhile foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was a lawyer but not an international lawyer and the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, was a lawyer who took his lessons from US sources that cannot be named.
  Such an event should never happen again if attention is paid to the principles of international law, and every single day left in the so-called fight against terrorism will benefit from the constant direction of international lawyers. Article 38 of the UN charter states that the sources of international law are international conventions, international custom, the general principles of law recognised by civilised nations, judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations, as subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law.