In the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence the nascent United States acknowledged “a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind.” This constituted, to a certain extent, an express acceptance of the binding force of international law, a corpus of rules based upon generally prevalent opinio juris.

It is now more than a decade since the Soviet Government took over control of the Russian state. During that period the government has had to face and has attempted to solve, interms compatible with its special ideology, the problem of permanent adjustment to a world with radically divergent conceptions of the legal order. How that international adjustment has thus far been made becomes a question of genuine importance, for, in proportion as it has materialized in treaty form,it has thrown new light on the major problem of regional and international security. In the ensuing pages the foundations, buttresses and super structure of a system of security as conceived in Moscow will be dealt with, and the relation they bear to the rivalsystems of Geneva and Washington considered. It is believed that the polices of the Kreml in have developed, in a decade, on the basis of positive treaty law, the broad framework of a system of security having far-reaching legal significance.

The concept of public goods is often operationalized in the literature as anything that demands some form of international cooperation. While this may be politically useful in generating international cooperation, it is analytically problematic for designing international law with the purpose of enhancing international cooperation. Many of the issues characterized as public goods are in fact common pool resources, which pose distinct issues for international cooperation and demand different legal architectures than public goods for effective international cooperation.

It is difficult to engage from a theoretical perspective an advocacy piece that largely reads like a brief in favor of particular claim of law, namely, that a state’s failure to (vigorously) criminalize marital rape violates international human rights law. In a brief, the litigant pulls together various sources to prove the legal claim is correct. Opponents typically respond by cobbling together their own sources to undermine that claim. In their essay, Criminalizing Sexual Violence Against Women in Intimate Relationships, Randall and Venkatesh set out to prove that international human rights law, in fact, requires states to criminalize marital rape. I suspect there are international lawyers who can persuasively argue that international human rights law does not, in fact, require such criminalization.

On March 29, 2017, the U.K. Government triggered Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) on withdrawal from the European Union following a referendum on June 23, 2016 in which 51.89 percent voted for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. As a hybrid provision, the much-discussed withdrawal provision in Article 50 TEU is part of EU law yet also anchored in public international law. Although the European Union is a unique, supranational organization that creates rights for individuals that are directly effective in national law, its member states created the European Union based on traditional treaties under international law.

The incidents of the great war now raging affect so seriously the very foundations of international law that there is for the moment but little satisfaction to the student of that science in discussing specific rules. Whether or not Sir Edward Carson went too far in his recent assertion that the law of nations has been destroyed, it is manifest that the structure has been rudely shaken. The barriers that statesmen and jurists have been constructing laboriously for three centuries to limit and direct the conduct of nations toward each other, in conformity to the standards of modern civilization, have proved too weak to confine the tremendous forces liberated by a conflict which involves almost the whole military power of the world and in which the destinies of nearly every civilized state outside the American continents are directly at stake.

The Senate on March 16, 1961, by a vote of 72 to 18, advised and consented to the ratification of the Convention on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and its three protocols signed at Paris December 14, 1960. The Organization is a consultative forum capable of initiating agreements on the use and development of economic resources, on removing obstacles to trade and current payments, on liberalization of capital movements, on the flow of capital to less developed countries. The 20 signatories are the industrialized states of Europe, Canada and the United States. A vociferous opposition to the convention by interests that erroneously thought it might reduce tariffs was heard by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Whether on that account or because they realized the importance of the convention itself, members of that committee in two executive sessions carefully probed official spokesmen to satisfy themselves that the convention did not affect the powers of the President or Congress. As a consequence, the resolution approving the convention took this unusual form:

Among the numerous problems of an international interest which havebeen raised by the Spanish war, there is one which has attracted the attention of jurists to a lesser degree than certain others, such as the question of the recognition of belligerency, or that of non-intervention. Yet this problem is not without interest from a strictly juridical point of view, for it poses an important question of terminology and, at the same time, permits the clarification of a notion which, although simple, clear and formerly well understood, has been so obscured by erroneous thought that it is difficult to realize that its actual meaning seems to have been lost by our contemporaries. The problem to which we refer is that of piracy, and it is as a result of the misunderstanding and distortion of this term that the civil war in Spain has first come to be inscribed in the annals of maritime warfare.

All humanitarian action takes place in a political context, and has, therefore, a political content. This means that all “humanitarian” organizations, such as those operating under the sig of the Red Cross, have a duty to define a humanitarian policy which will be valid in the long term, based on a thorough analysis of the political context, the main characteristics of an epoch, the political societies of our time, and the world political system. Such a humanitarian policy entails in turn the development of a humanitarian strategy which is distinct from the tactical moves imposed by varying crises. Neglect of this work of reflection leads to contradiction and confusion and, worse still, the degradation of humanitarian action to the level of a political instrument.