International law, as it appears in the pages of the American Journal of International Law, is largely public international law. Conflict of laws is usually considered to be either outside international law or part of private international law. This symposium in AJIL Unbound, with its focus on the Restatement of the Law (Third) Conflict of Laws, is therefore noteworthy. It also is welcome, because there is much to gain from thinking about conflict of laws and international law together.

In his essay on the “Uniting for Peace” resolution, Larry Johnson suggests that the General Assembly can recommend non-use of force collective measures when the Security Council is blocked because of a permanent member casting a veto. He rightly points out that today there is no longer any need to use Uniting for Peace for such recommendations. The General Assembly can and has recommended so-called “voluntary sanctions” in cases where it found a threat to international peace and security to exist. For example, in resolution 2107 (XX) of December 21, 1965 concerning the Question of Territories under Portuguese Administration, the Assembly, making no reference to Uniting for Peace, urged “Member States to take the following measures, separately or collectively:

1. (a) To break off diplomatic and consular relations with the Government of Portugal or refrain from establishing such relations;

2. (b) To close their ports to all vessels flying the Portuguese flag or in the service of Portugal;

3. (c) To prohibit their ships from entering any ports in Portugal and its colonial territories;

4. (d) To refuse landing and transit facilities to all aircraft belonging to or in the service of the Government of Portugal and to companies registered under the laws of Portugal;

5. (e) To boycott all trade with Portugal.”

In Zivotofsky v. Kerry, the Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of a 2002 law, Section 214(d) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003, which required consular officials to mark the word “Israel” as the birthplace of U.S. citizens who were born in Jerusalem if they requested that designation. The U.S. State Department refused to comply, pursuant to a policy of neutrality by the executive branch of the U.S. government concerning sovereignty over the much-contested city. The parents of a boy born in Jerusalem sued in federal court to see the law enforced. In its decision, the court found that Section 214(d) was an unconstitutional usurpation by Congress of the President’s exclusive authority to recognize foreign governments. The policy of official U.S. neutrality in regard to sovereignty over Jerusalem was upheld.

Dispute settlement is entrenched in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) through the Part XV compulsory mechanisms. It is also reflected in UNCLOS's indication that delimitation of the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf is to be by way of agreement between coastal states. While maritime boundary delimitation may be viewed as dominated by judicialization, that is not reflected in UNCLOS. The maritime boundary delimitation project unleashed by UNCLOS gave primacy to delimitation by agreement, with third party settlement under Part XV the secondary mechanism. The 2018 Australia/Timor-Leste maritime boundary settlement highlights how, even when Part XV third party mechanisms were used, the coastal states were able to reach agreement on a maritime boundary by negotiation, without recourse to judicialization.

The economic mandate of the “misnamed” International Labour Organization (ILO) has long been “othered” internationally. The ILO's 1944 constitutional annex, the Declaration of Philadelphia, confirms the ILO's “responsibility … to examine and consider all international economic and financial policies and measures in the light of th[e] fundamental objective” of lasting peace on the basis of social justice. After 1945, through decolonization, and prior to the emergence of a Washington consensus-based neoliberal globalization, the ILO enabled some states to mediate the “social” in economic regulation—that is, to adopt free trade economic liberalism promoted transnationally with social redistribution addressed domestically, also referred to as embedded liberalism. States established and harmonized international labor standards through multilateral processes steeped in an organizational tripartism that made workers’ and employers’ representatives ILO institutional actors alongside governments. At least in the global North, the ILO fostered a high degree of normative convergence nationally, regionally, and on shop floors. For the first Director-General, Albert Thomas, the ILO “taught the world to speak something like the same language on social questions.” Its approach has been nuanced, pragmatic, and transnational, taking leadership on issues like social protection that should also have been—but were not—the focus of other international economic institutions.

International law is no stranger to controversy in the U.S. court system. The Supreme Court’s occasional citations to international law and foreign laws have generated debate in Congress, academia, and civil society, and between the justices themselves. In 2004 and 2005, “Constitution Restoration Act” bills were introduced into both houses of Congress that would have, inter alia, subjected federal judges to impeachment for any citation to international or foreign law (other than the English common law) when interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Neither bill was adopted, but they attracted five senatorial cosponsors and thirty-four in the House of Representatives.

On November 22, 2000, President Clinton signed into law the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, closing a jurisdictional gap that had concerned the military since the 1950s. The new law establishes federal jurisdiction for crimes committed by civilians who accompany military forces outside the United States, as well as crimes by former members of the military who leave active duty before being prosecuted by courts-martial. Jurisdiction to prosecute under the new statute, however, is granted only to U.S. Article III courts and not to courts-martial.

On March 7, 1995, Conoco oil company of Houston, Texas, announced that it had entered into a contract with Iran to have a Netherlands-based affiliate assist in the development of the Sirri Island oil field. In response, the Clinton administration issued Executive Order No. 12,957, prohibiting participation by U.S. entities in the development of Iranian petroleum resources. Eventually, Conoco withdrew from its contract, but in early May of 1995 the administration stepped up its pressure on Iran by issuing Executive Order No. 12,959, prohibiting U.S. entities from using foreign entities they owned or controlled to make investments in or conduct trade transactions with Iran. On July 13 of that year, the French oil company Total S.A. entered into an agreement with Iran to replace Conoco in developing the Sirri Island field, and over the next several months Iran struck nearly a dozen petroleum development agreements worth in excess of $50 million each with other foreign oil companies. Within a couple of months, both Houses of the U.S. Congress took up consideration of proposals to complicate Iran’s ability to develop its hydrocarbon resources. By the end of 1995, the proposals, which even extended to wholly foreign entities organized and operating outside the United States, had come to include Libya as well. Final passage of one of the proposals, specifically, H.R. 3107, took place in the Senate and the House in July 1996. It was signed into law as the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) on August 5.

The International Court of Justice rendered four judgments in 2011: on April 1, a ruling on the respondent’s preliminary objections in Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Georgia v. Russian Federation), upholding one objection and finding that the Court had no jurisdiction to entertain the application; on May 4, two rulings on Costa Rica’s and Honduras’s applications for permission to intervene in Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v. Colombia), rejecting both; and on December 5, a final decision on jurisdiction, admissibility, and the merits in Application of the Interim Accord of 13 September 1995 (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia v. Greece), finding for the applicant. The Court also issued three orders in incidental proceedings: on March 8, one on Costa Rica’s request for the indication of provisional measures in Certain Activities Carried Out by Nicaragua in the Border Area (Costa Rica v. Nicaragua); on July 4, one on Greece’s application for permission to intervene as a nonparty in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy); and on July 18, one on Cambodia’s request for the indication of provisional measures in Request for Interpretation of the Judgment of 15 June 1962 in the Case Concerning the Temple of Preah Vihear (Cambodia v. Thailand) (Cambodia v. Thailand). The Court indicated provisional measures in response to both requests, and granted Greece permission to intervene.

The present world war has made further changes in the constitutional relations among the nations of the British Commonwealth. This was to be expected, for each great crisis has left its mark on that relationship in the past. The first world war ended the purely colonial period in the history of the Dominions. Their military contributions to the Allied war effort gave them a claim to equal recognition with other small states and to a voice in the formation of policy. This claim was recognized within the Empire by the creation of the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917, and within the community of nations by Dominion signatures to the Treaty of Versailles and by separate Dominion representation in the League of Nations.

Grotius was three times in France, each in widely contrasting circumstances. The first visit was in 1598–9, when at the age of fifteen he accompanied Count Justin of Nassau and Barneveld as one of the suite of these envoys from the States General of Holland to Henry IV. The second sojourn from 1621 to 1631, covers the period after his escape from prison at Loevestein, ten years spent, with the exception of the spring and summer of 1623, in Paris. The third from 1634 to 1645, is the period of his Swedish service, when he was Ambassador of Queen Christina to the Court of Louis XIII. Thus of the sixty-two years of Grotius’s life, one third was spent in Paris. It is the second of these French sojourns which now concerns us, for it was during this period that Grotius prepared and published his magnum opus, De Jure Belli ac Pacis.

“The treaty-making power is an extraordinary power liable to abuse. Treaties make international law and also they make domestic law. Under our Constitution treaties become the supreme law of the land. They are indeed more supreme than ordinary laws, for congressional laws are invalid if they do not conform to the Constitution, whereas treaty law can override the Constitution. Treaties, for example, can take powers away from the Congress and give them to the President; they can take powers from the States and give them to the Federal Government or to some international body, and they can cut across the rights given the people by their constitutional Bill of Rights.”

Within the last year the output of designs for perpetual peace has attained something like flood proportions. Exhortations on how to make this the last war and how to win the peace outnumber the unofficial guides to victory. The volume of these publications, and their sales figures, attest a healthy general interest in the purposes for which we are fighting and the ways and means of achieving them. Inevitably, there is much clash of counsel, and some resulting bewilderment among the reading public. But there is one characteristic uniformity; whether they describe themselves as mere “approaches” to peace, or dogmatically present a fixed “blueprint,” most plans of post-war settlement advocate curtailment of national sovereignty and propose extensive and vigorous supranational organization.