With Judgment No. 238/2014, the Italian Constitutional Court (hereinafter Court) quashed the Italian legislation setting out the obligation to comply with the sections of the 2012 decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy; Greece intervening) (Jurisdictional Immunities or Germany v. Italy) that uphold the rule of sovereign immunity with respect to compensation claims in Italian courts based on grave breaches of human rights, including—in the first place—the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Court found the legislation to be incompatible with Articles 2 and 24 of the Italian Constitution, which secure the protection of inviolable human rights and the right of access to justice (operative paras. 1, 2).

Commenting on the International Law Commission m the eighth year of its existence, Professor Julius Stone urged the conversion of the Commission

Huig de Groot, whom we know and venerate under the Latinized name of Hugo Grotius, is not a man with one book to his credit; but lawyers of all parts of the world are celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of one work of his, De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres. It appeared, it would seem, sometime in the month of March, 1625. For many years it was looked upon as a tour deforce, as an extraordinary achievement for a politician in exile and a humanist to his finger-tips to have turned off within the space of a few months a treatise on a dry and admittedly technical subject, whose principles were ill-defined and, where known, were treated with scant respect.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld seemed a promising example of a special form of judicial role. Abstaining from deploying its ultimate power to judge the constitutionality of an action of a political branch, the United States Supreme Court used statutory construction to give a strong nudge in a direction favorable to human rights. It negated a questionable and controversial policy—President George W. Bush’s unilateral establishment of military commissions to try terrorist suspects by means of reduced procedures—and essentially remanded the matter to Congress. The initial fruits of that remand, the Military Commissions Act (MCA), came as a disappointment. The Act cuts back on judicial review of the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and other U.S. detention sites overseas; it limits certain key protections available to the accused in a military commission proceeding, as compared to courts-martial; and it takes a crabbed view of the requirements of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions—at least as applied to the actions of U.S. agents. Nonetheless, further judicial and congressional reconsideration is certainly possible—and highly desirable.

Customarily one begins a discussion about the effectiveness of international law by quoting Louis Henkin’s famous remark that “almost all nations obey almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.” For some, this empirical claim supports the notion that international law is a vital tool for furthering international cooperation across a broad range of issue areas. For others, the implicit suggestion that international law’s mere existence might be driving states’ behavior is a calamity of causal inference. Even if Henkin’s claim is empirically correct, effectiveness does not follow from compliance. For a third group, Henkin’s claim may not even be empirically correct. In at least some areas of international law, noncompliance may be relatively high. Deploying the same suspect causal reasoning that the second group worries about, international law skeptics have sometimes suggested that we might infer ineffectiveness on the basis of such noncompliance.

Hitler had been recognized by all foreign governments. Also during the last war the recognition was not withdrawn. One has therefore to assume that, from the point of view of international law, Hitler was the lawful government and representative of Germany. For the purposes of this article we need not deal with the question whether, according to German public law, he came to power, for instance, by means of a coup d'état or a perjury.

Numerous interpretative notes were exchanged by the Powers prior to signature of the General Pact for the Renunciation of War on August 27, 1928. Secretary Kellogg was reported to have said on August 8 that these interpretations “are in no way a part of the pact and can not be considered reservations. The interpretations will not be deposited with the text of the treaty.” It has, however, been asserted that “the interpretations and declarations, made in the diplomatic correspondence before the signature of the treaty, and either agreed to or not dissented from, are just as binding and just as much within the meaning of the treaty as if they were written into the treaty text.” This obviously denies any importance to the distinction between interpretative notes and reservations implied in Secretary Kellogg’s statement.

One of the most controversial rules of private international law is the exception of public order, the rule not to enforce foreign laws which are contrary to the fundamental conceptions of the law of the state having jurisdiction. There is no country in which this exception has not played an important rôle in the refusal to enforce foreign laws, and numerous writers have discussed the importance and difficulties of the exception of public order. Its problems had been thoroughly studied before the World War by many authorities on private international law, among others by Bustamante, Fiore, Kahn, Klein and Pillet, without a uniform solution having been reached. When, after the war, the states began to reestablish their international relations, the exception of public order began anew to play its rôle in the courts the world over, and to put the same difficulties before the judges dealing with cases of conflict between domestic and foreign laws.