1. The Chief Executive. — The Christian government of which Article 1 of the Treaty of Berlin speaks was to have as its first element a prince freely elected by the people.

This liberty of election was not, however, absolute. A restriction was placed, but only one, we believe: no member of the reigning European dynasties could be elected Prince of Bulgaria. It is easy to discover the reason for this provision, which under a general and impersonal form, was aimed directly at Russia. It was not desired that a grand duke, installed in Bulgaria, should make of the Principality an autonomous province of the Muscovite Empire. Nothing in the protocols of the Congress of Berlin permits the belief that there was any desire to push the precautionary measures further than that. If this condition was fulfilled, that the prince elected by the people should not belong to a reigning dynasty of the Powers, the choice of the Bulgarians would not be contested. Article III states, however, that this choice must be confirmed by the Sultan with the assent of the great Powers. Apart from the single case referred to in the text, could this confirmation and assent have been refused? On this point even the language of the Treaty of Berlin and the protocols of the Congress are not at all clear. It seems that very little concern was shown over the accumulation on this point of the germs of a thousand difficulties. Neither was it foreseen what would be the effect of Article III in case, for instance, only certain Powers should have refused their assent. Would a majority have sufficed or would unanimity have been necessary? And what if the confirmation of the Sultan should have been given while the assent of the Powers had been refused, or inversely ? All are questions difficult of solution. Many constructions have been proposed. The simplest, we believe, is this one. If the election was to be free — and that was the intention of the Congress — the confirmation of the Sultan and the approbation of the Powers should properly have followed an election regularly conducted, that is to say, one in which the person elected did not belong to a reigning family. The opposition of the Sultan or of the Powers, if based upon personal considerations, would have conflicted with the principle of free election. The right of the Sultan was purely honorary. It calls to mind what happens in Egypt where the case is seen of an hereditary Khedive who receives the investiture. In saying “ hereditary ” we imply that the investiture could not be. refused. It is given, however, because nominally the Sultan is the suzerain of the Khedive, as he was, nominally the suzerain of the Prince of Bulgaria.

What would it mean for international law to be effective? There are different senses of the word. In a dis-cussion of the idea of effectiveness, then, the first step is to distinguish a variety of different ideas. The aim is not to decide which sense of the word is the right one, conceptually or linguistically. The aim should be to discuss which of these ideas of effectiveness is important, worth thinking about.

In the fall of 2019, the Trump administration reached several trade arrangements, some of them tentative, with important U.S. trade partners. On October 11, 2019, China and the United States announced a preliminary trade deal subject to finalization—one that came after more than a year of escalating tariffs. Just a week earlier, the United States had signed two trade agreements with Japan, one regarding tariff reductions and the other regarding digital trade. None of these deals appear to require subsequent congressional approval in the eyes of the executive branch, unlike the earlier United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA), which was signed in November 2018 and whose fate in Congress appears promising as of mid-December of 2019. In addition to these trade arrangements, the fall of 2019 saw several developments in trade relations between the United States and the European Union tied to the long-running trade disputes.

On March 9, 2018, the highest officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and representatives of the international community assembled at the seat of the Court to welcome six newly elected judges and to bid farewell to the six who had concluded their term of office, including myself. In my then-capacity as President, I presided over their swearing-in ceremony, which, in accordance with the Rome Statute, must take place in open court. In my opening remarks, I emphasized that this ceremony, which takes place every three years, was an important moment for the institution. Six new judges were solemnly undertaking to exercise their respective functions impartially and conscientiously, something that embodies both individual and collective responsibilities. “Through renewal,” I said, “the institution ensures its continuity.”

Behavioral approaches have been successful in challenging the rational actor model of international legal analysis and supplementing that model with empirical evidence. Yet observing a set of features about the world requires ignoring or bracketing others. Behavioral approaches retain their own inevitable blind spots, which are not necessarily products of flawed experimental design, but stem from the paradigmatic traits of these approaches. These blind spots derive from an emphasis on methodological individualism, positivism, and experimentation. This emphasis may obscure the social aspects of international legal decision-making. For example, behavioral approaches to international law often use experimental data to describe cognitive tendencies. In doing so, these approaches may not seek and likely will not have tools to discover the meaning of a state action, or the human actions that produce that state action. That latter inquiry requires “historical, ethnographic and other sociological methods that analyze social life outside of the experimental setting.” In sum, behavioral approaches pursue both theoretical and empirical concerns different from those pursued in an interpretive mode of meaning-making.