When the late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht became a member of the International Court of Justice in February, 1955 (a position he was to fill effectively for barely five years, until the fall of 1959), he went to The Hague with some thirty years of devoted study and practice of international law behind him. As teacher and student of international law, as a most highly qualified publicist (in the words of Article 38(1) (d) of the Statute of the Court) of recognized universal authority, he had devoted himself both to the law in general and in particular to the problems of the judicial settlement of international disputes, whether by the Permanent Court of International Justice and its present-day successor, the International Court of Justice, or by ad hoc arbitration tribunals. Indeed, his writings as a whole display a rare preoccupation with the entire philosophy and the practical problems of the judicial settlement of international disputes, together with a deep understanding of its limitations and a satisfying freedom both from putting forward extravagant claims in its behalf and from purely theoretical speculations.

That a wrong done to an individual must be redressed by the offender himself or by someone else against whom the sanction of the community may be directed is one of those timeless axioms of justice without which social life is unthinkable. The most primitive form of redress which insisted on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was not really reparation at all, but retaliation pure and simple, treated as a substitute for reparation. Measures of individual retaliation are no longer permissible in municipal law and impartial tribunals are entrusted with the duty of determining the nature and the extent of the reparation for a given wrong according to the law of the land.

International law has tried to follow parallel lines of development in this respect but has failed to keep pace with municipal law, largely because of its inherent difficulties. Reprisals, which are no better than individual retaliation, continued till even the other day to be acknowledged as a legitimate mode of reparation. The Covenant of the League of Nations, while imposing restrictions on resort to war, left uncertain the right of nations to make use of force short of war, suggesting thereby that the legality of reprisals might remain untouched. The Charter of the United Nations forbids the use of force except in certain contingencies and the implication of the relevant provision may well be that reprisals are still legal as long as they do not involve the use of force.

When the Security Council of the United Nations investigates an event or situation at the scene, it establishes a credible factual basis for its consideration of the situation, and the situation itself may be stabilized by the presence of the investigators. These important benefits may involve concomitant difficulties for the state in whose territory the investigation occurs, since the presence of international investigators may be conceived of as a limitation of its sovereignty. Objections may also arise from states seeking to obscure the realities of the situation being investigated, or from states which resist as a matter of principle any functions of international organizations which appear to derogate from state sovereignty.

Option of nationality in its various forms played an important rôle in the international law and diplomacy of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. The concept undoubtedly reached a peak in popularity and demand in connection with the territorial settlements arising from the first World War, only to fall into disuse in subsequent years. The heyday of the idea of option in general international law and relations in the years following 1918 also coincided with the high point of the usage of the principle in Soviet diplomatic practice. Indeed, perhaps in the diplomatic repertoire of no other nation was option of nationality as frequently resorted to in this or any other comparable period as in the Soviet treaty arrangements of 1917–1924. Option in all its various juridical expressions occupied from the very first an extremely important place in the legal and political acts of the Soviet regime in its search for a modus vivendi with Russia’s neighbors. What is more, the experience of these first years firmly established option as an active and operative principle of Soviet foreign policy, in which capacity it has remained until the very present, whereas in the rest of the international community option has but rarely been revived since World War I.