Perhaps the easiest way to miss the legal significance of the Schuman Plan and the Treaty to which it gave rise is to study it in terms of familiar legal concepts. Like most really historical documents, the Treaty Constituting the European Coal and Steel Community,though conditioned by the legal concepts with which its drafters were familiar, makes history primarily because it takes a step beyond those traditional concepts.

Some years ago the author took occasion to review the role of international arbitration in the postwar world, concluding with the suggestion that the work of refining its technique and usefulness should continue to be pressed.Specific tasks to which such work might be directed were earlier suggested in the author's study, The Process of International Arbitration, including the task of preparation of “draft arbitration conventions and procedural rules which, with such further refinements in each individual arbitration as may be required, could serve as a basis for future arbitration proceedings.” It was further pointed out that: “The voluminous body of decisions of international tribunals must be brought together in an ordered system which will enable them to be later readily found by tribunals and advocates.”

To many international lawyers and army officers the terms “law of war” and “military necessity” are mutually incompatible. Many army officers consider the law of war as no more than a collection of pious platitudes, valueless, so they think, because it has no force and effect. Some international lawyers regard military necessity as the bête noire of international jurisprudence, destroying all legal restriction and allowinguncontrolled brute force to rage rampant over the battlefield or wherever the military have control.