The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of the Federal Reserve as a leading actor in global economic governance. As a creature of U.S. domestic law with an international presence and operational independence, the Fed wields authority without a well-defined international legal status, international legal standards to guide its conduct, or accountability to those around the world affected by its decisions. This Essay explores three conceptual approaches that could be used to develop norms, standards, and principles to address this gap.

In RJR Nabisco v. European Community, the Court added an exclamation point to a long term trend in its jurisprudence. It believes, this trend indicates, that private civil suits pose specific foreign relations issues, at least when the targets are foreign transactions and actors, to which the Court will respond by erecting barriers. To this general point the case adds an unsurprising, but still important codicil: These problems don’t go away when foreign states take advantage of the U.S. civil litigation system by acting as plaintiffs.

The Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis centers on an interpretation of Biblical texts that establishes human power over other creatures and the right to beneficial use of them, imposing a type of guardianship or a trust, not a right of ownership. The Pope emphasizes that message he presents is intended to be a universal one, not limited to all Catholics or even all Christians, but to “every person living on this planet.” The encyclical begins by reviewing several aspects of the present ecological crisis, then considers some principles drawn from the Judaeo-Christian tradition which can render commitment to the environment more coherent.

World Trade Organization (WTO) members have, once again, been unable to agree on the appointment of new members to the Appellate Body (AB) in a timely fashion, as one member's term expired on June 30, 2017, another member resigned in August 2017, and a third member's term will expire in December 2017, with no consensus on a process to fill those posts. The 2017 standoff follows on the heels of a fractious debate during the summer of 2016 over the United States’ decision to block the reappointment of AB member Sueng Wha Chang of Korea to a second term. Given that the AB has just seven members, the inability to quickly appoint new members to replace those whose terms have expired only adds to the difficulty of rendering decisions within the tight time frames called for in the WTO rules.

On November 15, 2019, President Trump pardoned or otherwise removed punishments for three members of the military—Lieutenant Clint Lorance, Major Mathew Golsteyn, and Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher—who had been found to commit, or had allegedly committed, criminal acts abroad that amounted to war crimes. These actions follow Trump's May 2019 pardon of First Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been found guilty of murdering a detainee in Iraq. These intrusions into military proceedings were an unusual use of the president's pardon power and have raised concerns about the U.S. commitment to international humanitarian law.

In spite of decades of efforts to digitalize trade, it remains labor- and paper-intensive. Shipping a container from Mombasa to Rotterdam generates a pile of paper that is twenty-five cm. high. Around thirty actors and more than one hundred people are involved throughout the journey, with the number of interactions exceeding two hundred. The unique characteristics of blockchain make it a promising technology to remove the multiple frictions and inefficiencies that plague international trade today and that have been put into sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential is significant, but technology on its own can do little. Trade digitalization cannot happen in a legal and regulatory vacuum. While law and regulation are often seen as constraints or means to counter unintended consequences of technological developments, they also play a key enabling role. International legal instruments already provide useful guidance in some areas, but gaps remain to be filled and more proactive action is needed across the globe to transpose existing legal instruments into national legislation. International organizations have a key role to play to help coordinate action on these two fronts.

The orthodox view of the Specially-Affected States Doctrine (SASD), grounded in the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) 1969 judgment in the North Sea Continental Shelf cases, is that practice leading to the emergence of a customary rule must include that of states “whose interests were specially affected.” The framing of this passage of the North Sea Continental Shelf judgment seems to imply both a positive and a negative importance for the practice of specially-affected states. Such practice is a requirement for the emergence of a new rule of customary international law. Acceptance by specially-affected states is, in other words, necessary but not sufficient for a rule of custom to emerge. Whether practice of specially-affected states can be sufficient to form a general custom is not resolved by this formulation, although it seems reasonable to infer that the ICJ had in mind that the combined involvement of specially-affected and other states was needed for the formation of such a rule of customary international law concerning basic principles of continental shelf delimitation. Conversely, the absence of rule-supporting practice by specially-affected states would have a negating effect on the emergence of a rule of customary international law, despite rule-affirming practice of states not specially affected. On this view, practice of only such states could not crystalize into a custom. One commentator has suggested that the negative construction does not mean that a single specially-affected state necessarily holds veto power over the formation of a new rule of customary international law, but asserted that “[i]f several ‘states whose interests are specially affected’ object to the formation of a custom, no custom can emerge.” Unsurprisingly, given this level of abstraction, such formulations do not themselves provide specificity as to how many (or which) specially-affected states would be sufficient to prevent the formation of a custom in a particular situation.

At Paris, on October 23, 1954, the United States, the United Kingdom, the French Republic (the “Three Powers”) and the Federal Republic of Germany, as part of the salvage operations following the collapse of the plan for a European Defense Community, signed a Protocol on the Termination of the Occupation Regime in the Federal Republic of Germany. The first article of that Protocol provides that, upon ratification by the four signatories, the so-called Contractual Agreements with the Federal Republic of Germany, originally signed at Bonn on May 26, 1952, shall enter into force—with, however, certain amendments contained in five Schedules to the Protocol.

As soon as the House of Representatives considers and passes the Diplomatic Relations Act of 1967, and the President signs the new Act into law, the United States will proceed to deposit its ratification of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. These two documents will make rather extensive changes in United States law and practice with respect to diplomatic privileges and immunities. It will be the purpose of this article to give a capsule summary of the manner in which the Diplomatic Relations Act may be anticipated to operate in the future, and to indicate the pertinent areas in which the previous United States law and practice will be affected thereby.

The peace conference held at Paris in 1919 was called upon to consider no question of wider political or economic significance than that of the ordering of navigation on those great rivers usually designated as international and of which the Danube affords one of the most striking examples. In the long progress of 1800 miles from its source eastwards to the Black Sea this river traverses or bounds the territory of eight extensive states displaying a route capable of beneficial exploitation on the part of every country in Europe. Rising on the easterly slope of the Black Forest hill region in the extreme south of Baden, where it is formed by the union at Donaueschingen of two small streams flowing southerly from points near Villingen and Furtwangen, the Danube pursues a general easterly course across Wurtemberg and Bavaria. At Ulm it is joined by the Iller and now becomes navigable.

The need for an international criminal jurisdiction was recognized by the General Assembly of the United tjations in a resolution adopted in 1948, in which it was stated in the preamble thalt “in the course of development of the international community, there will be an increasing need of an international judicial organ for the trial of certain crimes under international law.”

The significant rôle for the specialized agencies contemplated by the Charter of the United Nations is reflected in the constitutions of those agencies. It is the purpose of this paper to analyze, on a comparative basis, one aspect of the constitutional law of intergovernmental agencies related to the United Nations, viz., the flexibility of their constitutions. This study should reveal the degree of adequacy of this ingredient, so essential to the viability of these important international institutions.