[1]: 84–86 In 1939, Glanville Williams described hot pursuit as a legal fiction that treated an arrest as made at the moment when the chase began rather than when it ended, since a criminal should not be able to benefit from an attempt to escape.
[1]: 84 Because of its pedigree in English law, the principle has been exported to many former colonies of the British Empire, including the United States and Canada.
[2] The Supreme Court of Canada held in R. v. Macooh in 1993 that the right of a police officer in hot pursuit to make an arrest on private property, which it described as "well settled at common law", extended to summary offences as well as indictable offenses.
The participating states at the League of Nations Codification Conference of 1930 broadly agreed on the validity of the right of hot pursuit, but the proposed convention on territorial waters in which it was included was never ratified.
Although it does not form a settled tenet of international law, the principle has been invoked by the United States regarding Taliban militants crossing into Pakistan, by Turkey regarding its attacks on Kurdistan Workers Party bases in northern Iraq, and by Colombia regarding its raid on a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia camp in Ecuador, which led to the 2008 Andean diplomatic crisis.