The study of foreign relations law has been largely devoted to the study of domestic laws as they affect foreign policy, a welcome complement to the traditional emphasis on international law. There has been less interest, however, in the legal dimensions of formulating foreign policy, a particular form of statecraft that is reducible to neither the constraints of domestic law, nor those of international law but that remains, in its own specific way, legally informed. In articulating and extolling the value of that dimension, Guy de la Charrière, a long time legal advisor to the French foreign ministry who ended his career on the bench of the ICJ, contributed to our understanding of "foreign relations law" long before "foreign relations law" became fashionable. He did so in a way that emphasized the significance of strategic legal considerations in the formulation of foreign policy; what he called "la politique juridique extérieure des Etats" (the legal foreign policy of states). These considerations are not so much legal constraints as lawyers would have them, but factors that highly determine, over time, the orientation and purpose of states' policies and commitment to international law. Uncovering such early and non-Anglophone voices in the effort to formulate the conceptual framework of foreign relations law can help further problematize the very notion.