The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has drafted its Statute, adopted its Rules of Procedure, negotiated its headquarters agreement, and so far dealt with its first case. It is timely, therefore, to describe the Court’s institutional framework and to analyze its jurisdiction. A more extensive study, of course, will have to await its developing case law.

In the United States, with its government of separated powers and functions, it is the executive branch, and in particular the Department of State, that bears responsibility for implementing legislation on foreign relations. The success of implementation will depend on political decisions, involving competing national interests, as well as on institutional and personal considerations of the officials concerned. Inevitably, there is a gap between legislation and execution, especially when the Executive is not wholly sympathetic to the law. The gap may even devour legislated policies as the Executive refuses "to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," and bureaucratic and personal considerations distort judgments, exploit the generality and uncertainty of language, and lead to abuse of discretion. A notable instance of this problem has been executive implementation of legislation on international human rights.

Historically, public international law and private international law have been treated as two different legal systems that function more or less independently. Public international law regulates activity among human beings operating in groups called, nation-states, while private international law regulates the activities of smaller subgroups or of individuals as they interact with each other. Since the public international legal system coordinates the interaction of collective human interests through decentralized mechanisms and private international law coordinates the interaction of individual or subgroup interests primarily through centralized mechanisms, these coordinating functions are usually carried out in different forums, each appropriate to the task. The differences between the processes by which sanctions for violation of community norms are applied in the two systems and the differences in the nature of the units making up the communities that establish those norms tend to obscure the fact that both the public and the private international systems coordinate human behavior, and that thus the values that inform both systems must necessarily be the same.

The delimitation of maritime boundaries is one of the major areas of ocean law where disputes between countries occur with frequency and where the development of governing principles of law remains difficult. At the Law of the Sea Conference, delimitation of the continental shelf and economic zones between states with opposite or adjacent coasts was one of the last issues to be resolved. Major judicial and arbitral decisions, such as the North Sea Continental Shelf cases before the International Court of Justice and the Anglo-French Continental Shelf arbitration, have gone some way to developing a body of relevant law to assist states in the solution of their maritime boundary problems. These decisions have clarified some of the relevant factors that states should take into account, but major boundary problems remain. On the Aegean Sea, Greece and Turkey have still not reached any solution; relations between Canada and the United States have been severely strained by their slow progress on maritime boundary issues; Libya and Tunisia have referred their continental shelf dispute to the International Court of Justice.

The framework for the systematic registration and publication of international agreements on an intergovernmental level was set in Article 18 of the League of Nations Covenant, and later in Article 102 of the United Nations Charter. The purpose of treaty registration and publication is to give effect to the principle and policy of “open covenants”—enunciated as the first of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—in lieu of secret diplomacy. In addition, these procedures serve to record “contemporary trends in substantive international law” for the benefit of judicial and government practitioners, scholars, and specialists in various fields.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.