On November 7, 1973, Congress overrode the veto of President Richard Nixon and enacted a law intended to “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of the United States Armed Forces into hostilities.” A war-making process that had too long been political, many legislators euphorically believed, had been made legal.

In the last two decades, there have been three major international adjudications on continental shelf boundaries between states. Three additional cases are now pending before international tribunals. Two concern continental shelf boundaries and the other, a single exclusive economic zone and continental shelf boundary. There is every reason to believe that more cases are on the way. During this period, many international agreements have been negotiated to settle similar international ocean boundary disputes. Nevertheless, the vast majority of such boundaries have yet to be resolved.

Writing in 1968, the year of the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Richard Bilder concluded that “in practice, a claim is an international human right if the United Nations General Assembly says it is.” Fifteen years later, as the 35th anniversary is celebrated, the authoritative role that Bilder correctly attributed to the General Assembly is in serious danger of being undermined.

Procedural law on the international plane, especially the law applicable to international judicial proceedings, has long tended to be the poor relation of substantive law. In particular, insufficient attention has often been paid to its sources, and to the manner in which it may be created; and confident assertions tending to confuse the Sollen with the Essen, lex lata with lex ferenda, have been made with a frequency not to be expected in other fields of international law. Hence the common temptation to model international procedural norms or rules on what are perceived to be analogous dispositions of municipal procedural law, without taking sufficient account either of the degree of generality, actual or potential, of the municipal law rule, or of the accuracy of the analogy involved in its transfer to the international plane.