From time to time since the middle of the nineteenth century various efforts have been made to codify international law. Most of these have dealt with administrative and international private law (the conflict of laws) and more particularly with the laws of war and neutrality. Some of these efforts, particularly those of jurists of the Western Hemisphere, have, included in their scope the whole field of public and private international law. It was, however, left for the League of Nations to launch upon a world-wide effort to place in code form those rules which are regarded as the body of law on three important subjects of public international law. These efforts culminated in the Codification Conference held at The Hague from March 13 to April 12, inclusive, 1930. The three subjects before that Conference were Nationality, Territorial Waters, and Responsibility of States for Damage Caused in Their Territory to the Person or Property of Foreigners.

There are at present armed forces of the United States in England, Northern Ireland, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, China, India, Iceland, in British possessions in the Western Hemisphere from Newfoundland to British Guiana, and in other friendly countries. There are troops of Great Britain or her dominions in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and a few of them in the United States. English forces were a few months ago in Greece, and ours in the Dutch East Indies and Burma. There are troops of various exiled governments in England. The armed forces of Germany are in Italy, Libya, Hungary, and Rumania; and those of Japan in French Indo-China and Thailand. In every case mentioned, the visiting forces are in the foreign country by invitation, or at least with the consent, of its sovereign or government.

This paper analyzes the legal implications of the Draft Resolution and Draft Agreement Relating to the Implementation of Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed arrangements under international law.

The Syrian insurrection culminating in the bombardment of Damascus in October, 1925, is an incident of a kind which has frequently marred the relations of western Powers with less advanced peoples. Thus it may be of more than passing interest to examine the conduct of the parties concerned from the standpoint of international law.

International law is a system; its environment is the field of international relations. Although the word system is often used generically, it has a formal meaning in “general systems theory,” an interdisciplinary methodology that grew out of cybernetics research in the 1970S. Since then, general systems theory has proved to be a significant heuristic in hundreds of disparate research areas. In describing international law from the viewpoint of an autopoietic system (to be defined shortly), this article intends not just to reexamine the foundations of international law but also to help litigators and negotiators make their international-law arguments sounder and more persuasive.

In a Mexican challenge against U.S. criteria for labeling tuna products as “dolphin-safe,” the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), on May 16, 2012, held against the United States while reversing various findings of the panel. The case was one of three WTO Appellate Body decisions issued in 2012 that interpreted and applied the key substantive provisions of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement or TBT) for the first time. Systemically, the decision is important for its interpretation of the TBT Agreement’s substantive obligations, the types of labeling that fall within the scope of the Agreement, the legitimacy of labeling based on foreign process and production methods (PPMs), and the relation of other international law to WTO law.

The veto question, one of the most controversial problems facing the United Nations, has several aspects of unequal importance. First, there is the great political problem of the relations between the great Powers on the one hand, and the small and middle-sized states on the other, as well as of their role in an international organization. This problem, being a political one, is reflected in the whole constitutional structure and functions of the organs of the United Nations. Second, there is the well-established traditional legal principle of equality of states, big and small, mighty and weak. This principle was reiterated in the United Nations Charter in Article 2 (1), which reads: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” Both these aspects of the veto question are well known and have been discussed to such an extent as to be entirely left aside in these remarks.

For two and a half years, Colombia and Peru have engaged in a controversy regarding the status as a political offender and the ultimate disposition of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, long-time chief of the leftist Alianza Popular Revolucianaria Americana (APBA), who was granted asylum in the Colombian Embassy at Lima on January 3, 1949. Several months of fruitless diplomatic negotiation between the parties were followed by their submission of the case to the International Court of Justice which, in turn, has dealt with various aspects of the matter in the course of three successive judgments.

The most distinctive feature of the European Convention on Human Rights is the optional procedure under Article 25, whereby an individual claiming to be a victim of a violation of one of the rights guaranteed by the Convention may present a complaint against his own (or another) government to the European Commission of Human Rights for investigation. Thus the individual is given direct access to an international tribunal and is recognized as having the standing necessary to pursue his rights under international law.

Globalization has not conquered sovereignty. Instead, the notion of sovereignty occupies center stage in discussions concerning the normative architecture of cyberspace. On the diplomatic level, the term is generally employed in its broadest sense, one that signifies freedom from external control and influence. For instance, when Western states raise the issue of human rights in cyberspace, those on the opposite side of the negotiating table fall back on sovereignty-based arguments. Mention of sovereignty in consensus documents is consequently often the price that liberal democracies pay to advance their policy priorities, such as individual freedoms and the availability of self-help measures in response to hostile cyber operations.

The International Tin Agreement (ITA), one of the world’s oldest commodity pacts, ran out of money and discontinued its market support operations on October 24, 1985. Subsequent disclosures revealed that the organization not only had exhausted its cash reserves but also had borrowed over £900 million in an unsuccessful effort to support the price of tin. Member governments of the ITA failed to approve additional contributions to repay these loans, leaving banks and commodity brokers to absorb massive losses. The market price of tin plummeted to half its previous level. The collapse came as an unexpected shock, for the ITA had been widely viewed as the world’s most successful commodity pact. International agreements operating almost continuously during the past 50 years, including the ITA and its precursors, have been credited with successfully reducing fluctuations in the naturally volatile price of tin. The collapse now makes the whole future of tin regulation uncertain. In addition, the failure of tin sounds a warning for other commodity pacts, which are equally susceptible to the underlying weaknesses to which tin fell prey.

We are delighted to participate in this symposium on the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda (Tribunals; respectively, ICTY and ICTR). We have been asked to offer reflections on the Tribunals’ impact on substantive international criminal law (ICL)—in particular, the definitions of crimes and the modes of liability. Given the enormity of the topic, we can offer only a cursory and impressionist sketch of the terrain, and draw attention to a few intriguing features along the way. We will not attempt to survey the Tribunals’ jurisprudence or the related academic literature. Instead, our aim is simply to highlight three themes underlying the Tribunals’ elaboration of substantive legal standards. For the nonspecialist, this sketch may provide a helpful overview of the evolution of ICL. For the specialist, this sketch may bring into slightly sharper relief some underlying patterns in the Tribunals’ work. We will also offer some broader thoughts about the Tribunals in the overall arc of ICL, and how their structure and priorities have left a lasting, distinctive imprimatur on ICL.

For a significant period of time, the comparativist and the international lawyer were considered to inhabit different worlds: the former scrutinized similarities and differences between domestic legal systems while the latter focused on the universal realm of international law that overlays these systems. This comfortably segregated image has been conclusively shattered by numerous studies demonstrating the multiple areas of interaction between international and comparative law. of these, one of the ripest areas for further reflection is the “general principles of law” as a source of international law. Puzzlingly, given the traditional domestic law origins of the general principles of law, comparative law and methodology have rarely featured in the scholarship and jurisprudence on the general principles. Thus, the attempt of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (Icty) to use the general principles as a freestanding source of international criminal law provides a particularly intriguing opportunity to study the interaction between international and comparative law.