I must state from the outset that I am not convinced that an analysis like the one conducted by Joost Pauwelyn, though valuable from a statistical and quantitative point of view, is really apt to explain the different functioning of legal institutions, their efficiency in term of results achieved in relation to objectives, the satisfaction of the various group of users and the reasons for their being subjected to criticism. The different architecture of the trade and investment systems reflects different constituencies, objectives and needs. Praise and criticism come from different groups of users and nonusers, and they change over time due to changing perceptions, objectives, and interests.

What are the legacies for gender justice of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)? Darryl Robinson and Gillian MacNeil in this symposium describe the modernization of the law on sexual violence as a key legacy of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals. However, this characterization does not capture the wider challenges that gender based crimes have raised for the Tribunals, including other legacies of gendered hierarchiesand inequalities.How, then, is it possible to move past these issues to build international criminal justice so that it transforms, rather than reproduces, gendered injustices?

The sinking on the high seas of the Canadian registered schooner I’m Alone as a suspected rum runner resisting boarding for enquiry (visit and search) by the United States Coast Guard patrol boat Dexter after a two days chase from a point a short distance off the coast of Louisiana, has given rise to considerable discussion in the press of the United States and Great Britain, and suggests several interesting questions of international law and treaty construction.

The first telegraph had been in operation only a short time when a code was made available to the users of the new instrument. From that time to the present, codes for use in electrical communications have appeared in ever-increasing number. Two principal objects have been sought and achieved by their use: secrecy and economy. To the business man, the second of these objects is paramount; and code-makers have constantly endeavored to express an increasing amount of information in a given number of letters.

There has, it seems clear, been a change, in quality and in degree, in the general condition of relations between the two main competing social and economic systems, Soviet and Western, since the October, 1962, crisis, which brought us all so close to the edge of nuclear war. The crisis itself, whatever the original motives which induced Premier Khrushchev to venture his offensive, ground-to-ground, nuclear weapons into Cuba, was terminated happily, with an unusual display of reasonableness and self-restraint, and mutual give-and-take, as between the two competing systems. It may be correct to conclude, as Walter Lippmann (echoing President de Gaulle) does, that the peaceful resolution of the October, 1962, crisis marked the “end of the Postwar period.” On this view, the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty of August, 1963, simply ratified and concretized in certain particulars a fundamental accommodation or détente that had already occurred de facto between the two systems; while the more recent achievement of the so-called “Hot Line” system for direct, emergency communication between the Kremlin and the White House and the additional accord on preventing the orbiting of nuclear weapons in space vehicles, for their part, served to confirm and extend the détente in some further practical details.

In my full-length article U.S. Law Enforcement Abroad, I argued that government-sponsored abduction from foreign countries was not only distasteful, but contrary to international law and U.S. constitutional law. Though I acknowledged that the reported decisions here and abroad did not, on the whole, support my argument, I suggested that these decisions were out of step with contemporary international law and current American views of due process of law. I expressed skepticism about many of the defenses of the practice that had been raised by American officials and had too often, in my judgment, been accepted by American courts. In particular, I urged that no great faith be placed in assertions by the U.S. Government that abduction of persons who ended up in American custody were carried out solely by the police of the foreign country, that the United States had no knowledge of or participation in torture, or that the foreign country really consented to the operation, though it could not say so publicly.

In his thought-provoking and timely article, Pauwelyn asks how it can be “that today’s perception of two parallel processes involving the legalization of world politics, and on two closely related subjects of global economic affairs—cross-border trade and cross-border investment—differs so much?” He focuses on one explanation: the individuals deciding World Trade Organization (WTO) versus International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) disputes.

In view of the increased interest in the problem of finding a legal definition for “war” or the “state of war” it seems worth while to consider briefly the hitherto rather neglected contributions to the subject by American and English courts. The problem of defining war has been effectively treated from several other viewpoints, but these English and American cases are worth examination for the further light they may shed on the fundamental questions involved. The fact that these decisions were in part prompted by the necessity of interpreting the phrase “war” or “state of war” in domestic statutes and that in all cases it is merely the voice of a national court speaking, need not detract from the value of the survey. The basis upon which judgment was rendered in most cases was (or at least was asserted to be) that of the law of nations, and, in the words of Chief Justice Marshall, the decisions of national courts “show how the law of nations, in a given case, is understood in that country.”

A difference of opinion of more than usual interest has recently developed with regard to the composition of the International Commission of the Danube. The question at issue turns upon the interpretation of certain articles of the Treaty of Versailles in the light of the important constitutional changes which have occurred within Germany since 1919. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the International Commission was to include “two representatives of German riparian States,” in addition to representatives of the other riparian and certain non-riparian States. Since the signature of the Treaty, there has been a gradual redistribution of powers within Germany, culminating in 1934 when the sovereign powers of the German states were transferred to the Reich. When the German representatives at the session of the International Commission in December, 1934, presented full powers issued in the name of the Reich alone, their eligibility was challenged, and they were allowed to take their seats only under a modus vivendi pending settlement of the issue. At the request of the British and French Governments, in which other States represented on the International Commission subsequently joined, the dispute was referred to the League of Nations Advisory and Technical Committee for Communications and Transit.