Recent events in the international monetary system culminating in the decision of the United States, announced on August 15, 1971, to suspend the convertibility of the dollar induce the international lawyer to ask once again what contribution sanctions can make to respect for international law and the effectiveness of multilateral treaties. This question has been a practical problem at two stages in the development of the International Monetary Fund. It arose first during the negotiation and drafting of the original Articles of Agreement which were adopted at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944. The second stage was the negotiation and drafting of the amendment of July 28, 1969, which dealt mainly with the legal structure of special drawing rights as a supplement to existing reserve assets. It is now apparent that there will be a third stage, in which a reform of the international monetary system, perhaps in some of its most fundamental aspects, will lead to a further amendment of the Fund's charter.

Signs of inadequacy and crisis in general international law as to the economic ownership interests of aliens have been numerous since World War II. The pages o f the J ournal have recorded and analyzed a number of situations in which the existing legal order is not working well: ineffectual resorts to international adjudication; unilateral disregard of arbitral commitments; national decisions made in the name of international law but of dubious international acceptability; professional frustrations so intense as to have directed prime attention to happenstantial “salvage” operations. In a phase now apparently ended, groups in capital exporting countries have tried time after time to put forward normative formulations of investment codes as new positive law, only to have their efforts ignored in developing countries. Now we seem to be in a new phase, one in which direct investment-receiving, or host, countries, organized into groups or regional arrangements, compact among themselves that a comprehensive normative system shall prevail in each of them as to the legal relationships between foreign investors and each of those countries. Although foreign investment codes for particular states, including systems of prior restraints on entry in some developed countries, are not new, the Andean Foreign Investment Code is, indeed, a new juristic phenomenon. The Editors of the Journal have wished, therefore, to record and analyze preliminarily this new development in transnational investment law, one whose text has been carried in International Legal Materials and considered as to its possible impact in Research Panels organized by the American Society of International Law.

The sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat by Styx missiles from a naval platform during the 1967 hostilities between Israel and the United Arab Republic demonstrated that missile technology was sufficiently developed for this weapon to be effectively deployed. The appearance of the missile in naval armament has raised old questions of international law in a new form, and it seems appropriate that they should be discussed as an aspect of the search for a system of legal controls to limit the use of the sea for strategic and political purposes. The aim of this paper is to examine the question of protection of the innocent from injury both inside and outside the target area, and in times of war and local, limited hostilities.

No recent issue has so divided lawyers and writers in the field of international law as the question whether courts of one nation should sit in judgment on the acts of other nations with respect to foreign held property—sometimes, always, or never. The United States Supreme Court in Banco Nacional de Cubav. Sabbatinosaid the answer was never—or at least hardly ever—thus upholding and reaffirming the “act of state doctrine”. The Congress in the Hickenlooper (or Sabbatino) Amendmentmade an effort to reverse that ruling, an effort that has proved largely unsuccessful. Now the State Department has taken its turn, arguing in a formal communication to the Supreme Court that when it perceives no objection to adjudication on foreign policy grounds, the courts should judge the validity of the foreign nation's acts under international law standards—at least as to counterclaims.