Our intramural, often scholarly, but not always polite, debates about the legitimacy of invasions directed against more-or-less brutal authoritarian governments demonstrate how one’s preferred conception of the nature of law can affect one’s conclusions about its contents.

The celebrants of what I will call the classical view display the following characteristics: while recognizing that states can establish and alter norms through both explicit agreements normally expressed in written texts and implicit agreements manifested in practice, they tend in their epistemology toward a rather strict separation of these two processes; when attempting to identify norms arising from explicit agreements, they presume that the parties had an original intention which can be discovered primarily through textual analysis and which, in the absence of some unforeseen change in circumstances, must be respected until the agreement has expired according to its terms or been replaced by mutual consent; when attempting to identify norms arising from implicit agreement, they rely primarily on relatively formal manifestations of consent, deemphasize the relative power of states, and imply a high threshold below which alleged norms are entirely without legal character.

Judged by its inability to agree upon a convention on territorial waters, as the substance of things hoped for, the Conference for the Codification of International Law was a failure. Good may come of the Conference. It may have been a necessary preliminary stage in a very long and difficult process. Nevertheless, the fact remains that its purpose was to agree upon a convention upon territorial waters and it failed of its purpose. Usually the cause of the ill-success of a conference is lack of preparation. This failure cannot be ascribed to lack of preparation. It is unnecessary to rehearse the antecedent steps. Several years had been devoted to preparation. Governments had agreed that the subject of territorial waters was suitable and ripe for codification. In addition to the work done by the Committee of Experts and by the Preparatory Committee, the governments had answered voluminous questionnaires and had made observations upon detailed schedules of points from which had been prepared the bases of discussion. All of this work had been completed and in print months before the Conference met. Apparently nothing was left undone by the agencies of the League of Nations in order that the various governments might have ample opportunity for examination and study of the questions involved. And, it may be added, the observations of the governments were for the most part responsive and illuminating.

We structured this symposium on the premise that comparison reveals critical differences. We asked our authors, as noted in the introduction, to describe their methodology, apply it to the concrete problem of accountability for atrocities in internal conflict, and discuss its merits and demerits relative to other approaches presented in the symposium. We threw out these questions as a means of structuring a debate in a way that would be most helpful to our readers and that would encourage our authors to engage with each other as self-consciously as possible. We did not seek competition as an end in itself, but as a spur to self-reflection.

One of the most persuasive arguments advanced by the advocates of the repeal of the Connally Amendment has been its “boomerang effect.” While it was intended to protect the vital interests of the United States as a respondent, it also protected, on the basis of reciprocity and perhaps less intentionally, the respondent state in a case instituted before the International Court of Justice by the United States as the applicant.

On October 22, 1981, the Governments of Iceland and Norway approved an agreement for the joint management of the resources of the Jan Mayen continental shelf. Incorporating the recommendations of a three-member conciliation commission, the Agreement obviated the need to draw a line demarcating the right to exploit the nonliving resources in the disputed area. The proliferation of boundary disputes during the intervening 7 years makes this an appropriate time to look at the potential benefits of using this approach in other maritime boundary disputes. After reviewing the stages in the resolution of the Jan Mayen dispute and the terms of the Agreement, this essay will discuss other situations in which the joint development approach has been used, the factors affecting its success and some examples of current delimitation disputes where this approach may be applicable.

In November 2016, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) at the International Criminal Court (ICC) produced an extensive report documenting the status of ten “preliminary examinations” it is conducting. These examinations cover situations in which crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court may have been committed but the prosecutor has not yet decided to open a full investigation. The OTP's reporting practice has shed additional light on a process that has been opaque for much of the Court's existence and that has attracted relatively limited scholarly and specialist attention.

On December 18, 1951, the International Court of Justice at The Hague rendered its judgment in the Fisheries Case between the United Kingdom and Norway. By ten votes to two the International Court declared “that the method employed for the delimitation of the fisheries zone by the Royal Norwegian Decree of July 12, 1935 is not contrary to international law.”

Relations between the United States and most other countries, including major U.S. allies, have been severely strained during the past year by divergent opinions about the rules of international law governing the use of armed force. On the one side, the Bush administration has unveiled a new strategic doctrine asserting the right to use force preemptively against any country or terrorist group that could potentially threaten U.S. security. On the other side, most UN members have rejected the Bush doctrine as inconsistent with the traditional view that armed force can only be used when authorized by the Security Council or in self-defense against an armed attack. I will argue that neither the new Bush doctrine nor the strict interpretation of the “jurisprudes” represents good law or good policy. The new strategic environment, marked by suicidal terrorists and the spread of mass destruction weapons, requires a different approach.

It is proposed in the present paper to examine the act of state doctrine enunciated in the dictum of Chief Justice Fuller in Underhill v. Hernandez that

During the last two decades, we have frequently heard about a “crisis” in the kingdom of international law. Without engaging in semantics, one can understand the word “crisis” in its normal dictionary meaning as “a turning point in the progress of anything”; more, “a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent.” However, these connotations are not necessarily present in the minds of those who apply the term to international law. They intend rather to refer to the weakness to which it is condemned, to its subordinate role and fragile existence; even international lawyers may speak of its “ambiguity.” In some instances, they point to the prevalence of a sense that “resort to legal arguments by policy-makers may be detrimental to world order and thereby counterproductive for the state that uses such arguments.” Thus, a picture of gloom is painted and the world almost consigned to lawlessness in international relations.

It is inherent hi the nature of a closer relation of states that an organ be created for the decision of disputes between the individual members of a confederation. The Swiss Confederation has at all times applied itself to this task.

In October 1997, a little-noticed event took place at the United Nations that may roll back the international legal protection of human rights. Jamaica became the first country to denounce the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and thus withdrew the right of individual petition to the UN Human Rights Committee (Committee). Although it is provided for under the Protocol’s Article 12, no state has previously made such a denunciation.

In more than one respect the part played by Grotius (1583–1645) in the history of jurisprudence presents perplexing features. His chief glory lies in the department of law; yet he was more of a philologist and of a theologian than of a jurist. He is often called the father of international law; yet his principal book, the famous book of 1625, was not a treatise devoted to international law. His book, by reason of many of its qualities, looks obsolete: written in Latin, full of quotations and authorities unknown to modern readers, silent about medieval and modern history, it is still a young and living book, younger even than it was two centuries ago.

In recent years, increased attention has been focused on international conflicts of interest with respect to international rivers of the Middle Bast. The creation of new political units in the area after the first World War, their attainment of independence, and the creation of new states in the years following the second World War, fragmented the areas irrigated by most of the Middle East’s rivers.

The law of naval warfare as it existed in 1899 and as it is understood in 1999 exhibits a few similarities but many differences. The fundamental similarity is that the law of naval warfare can be seen, then as now, as consisting primarily of customary international law. The many differences in this law have been caused by the major changes in war at sea and the law of the sea. In 1899 war at sea meant combat primarily by gunfire between surface warships, control of maritime commerce, and shore bombardment. Today, war at sea also involves nuclear-powered aircraft carriers; supersonic aircraft, helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft; submarines; high-speed patrol craft; ballistic, cruise, and other guided missiles; long-range secure communications for command, control, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; radar; underwater sound technology; electronic and information warfare; satellites in space; unmanned aerial and undersea vehicles; and stealth and computer technology; as well as expeditionary and amphibious capabilities. Nevertheless, the fundamental role of navies continues to be to establish control at sea or to deny it to the enemy, linking that control to broad political and economic issues ashore. In view of these constants and changes, this article reviews the state of the law of naval warfare at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and assesses its future prospects.