The Charter of the United Nations does not contain an express provision prohibiting, permitting or regulating the question of withdrawal from the Organization. The absence of such a provision from the text of the Charter has caused uncertainty, confusion and controversy.

The General Assembly Resolution of December 17, 1970,1 has been widely acclaimed for its affirmation of the principles that

Words mean whatever I say they mean, Humpty-Dumpty rather grandly explained shortly before his accident. Similarly, statutes, perforce, mean whatever those who implement them say they mean.

The opinion of the International Court of Justice in the Nicaragua case will be of interest primarily because of its general pronouncements on questions of international law. Its impact on the immediate controversy appears slight; the United States Government has strongly indicated its view that the Court lacked jurisdiction over the controversy, has vetoed subsequent proposed Security Council resolutions on the subject, and is appropriating additional funds for the contested activities, without apparent reference to the Court’s decision. This Comment is limited to the general theoretical and legal issues and will not treat the underlying factual issues, the Court’s disposition of the immediate case or the implications of the opinion for the evolution of the dispute.

Among the problems recurrently agitating European chancelleries and military strategists is that of the status of the Aaland Islands. Located between Sweden and Finland athwart the entrances to the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, these islands long have played a role of importance in North European affairs which bids fair to increase in significance in the immediate future. The islands have a direct bearing upon the military and naval strategy of all countries bordering upon the Baltic Sea, and their status must be of concern to all nations having shipping interests in this region. The so-called Aaland Islands Question is now a complex of questions regarding sovereignty and title to the islands, as well as their neutralization and militarization.

It will be remembered that notes were exchanged between the United States, Great Britain, Soviet Kussia, and the Republic of Turkey on the subject of the Turkish Straits which it was desired during the Potsdam talks to link with the general problem of peace. It is our intention to discuss the problem of the Straits in the light of these notes.

The handling by the International Law Commission (ILC) of state responsibility, hazardous activities, and strict liability reveals in many ways the Commission’s strengths and limitations. This work also tells much about the development of international law and the extent to which there is—or is not—an international community. The Commission’s work on state responsibility in particular also illustrates the validity of Holmes’s immortal statement about logic and the life of the law, the utility of Occam’s razor, and the value of William James’s pragmatism. Even if Philip Allott were close to the mark—as he often is—in calling the draft articles, as they then were, “bland gruel,” it is hard to ignore the need for the articles or their contribution to the unification of international law. Both are witnessed by tribunals’ eagerness to cite the Commission’s texts even before their formal adoption. While this practice has upset some as premature, it reflects the symbiotic process that has evolved over time as both the Commission and courts and tribunals labor to clarify existing law. Codification of lex lata may be no less effective if contained in a paragraph of a report rather than in an article of a multilateral treaty.

Shortly after termination of the now historic Nuremberg trial of Nazi Germany’s arch war criminals, formal proceedings were instituted against several other classes of major offenders against the laws of war in Western Europe. This second phase of the program included war crimes committed in S.S. laboratories, in the name of medical experimentation, and the socalled “economic” war crimes. Simultaneously with these proceedings preparations were made for still a third class of offenders to be brought to international justice, and it is this group which has recently been indicted. Here the charges are predicated upon illegal activity of enemy nationals engaged in administering justice in territories under military occupation, frequently involving the execution of inhabitants after a summary hearing, or after no trial at all. For the international lawyer this third category of war crimes contains many stimulating and significant elements. It raises highly challenging questions as to the extent to which criminal responsibility may be held to exist in cases where enemy nationals performing functions of a judicial or a quasi-judicial character have participated in the pronouncement and execution of sentences, including the death penalty, against nationals of the occupied areas.

The recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Factor v. Laubenheimer and Haggard has broken new ground with reference to the interpretation of the extradition treaties between the United States and Great Britain, and it seems to deserve special consideration as a contribution to the law of extradition. Factor's extradition was requested by Great Britain on a charge of receiving certain sums of money, aggregating £458,500, known to have been fraudulently obtained. On the complaint of a British consul, Factor was taken into custody in Illinois, and a United States Commissioner in Illinois issued a warrant for his commitment pending surrender. On a return to a writ of habeas corpus, the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered his discharge from custody, but this order was reversed by the Circuit Court of Appeals. Both the District Court and the Circuit Court of Appeals seem to have regarded extradition as possible only if the offense charged was a crime both by the law of Great Britain and by the law of Illinois; the District Court held that receiving money known to have been fraudulently obtained was not a crime by the law of Illinois, but a majority of the Circuit Court of Appeals, relying chiefly on Kelly v. Griffin, took the contrary view. On certiorari, the Supreme Court held that the offense charged was an extraditable crime even if it is not punishable by the law of Illinois, the opinion being written by Justice Stone. Justice Butler was joined in a vigorous dissenting opinion by Justices Brandeis and Roberts.

Refugees dominate contemporary headlines. The migration “emergencies” at the southern U.S. border and the southern borders of the European Union, as well as the “crisis” in the Bay of Bengal, have drawn global attention to the dire inadequacies of the international refugee regime, even as extended through various principles of non-refoulement, in governing modern migration flows. Political responses to these mass movements, from the Brexit vote to the election of Donald Trump and his executive order halting the refugee resettlement process in the United States, have threatened the viability of refugee law's protections. At the policy level, numerous high-level stakeholders have convened in different constellations, through the United Nationsand other bodies; manycommentatorsagree that these meetings have accomplished little thus far in terms of law reform. The refugee law paradigm consumes so much space in the imagination of international lawyers and policymakers that it is hard even to begin to conceptualize an alternate approach to global migration law. The fear of losing even the narrow ground staked out to protect refugees stiffens the resistance to change. Proposals for reform tend to follow the tired old path of suggesting ways in which the refugee definition can be expanded to include new groups of migrants (ranging from climate change refugees to anyone fleeing serious human rights abuses) rather than critically evaluating the structure of global migration law more broadly.

Anticorruption treaties generally define corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. As such, global anticorruption efforts primarily target transactions involving the bribery of governmental officials. The definition excludes transactions in which multinational corporations deprive developing states of revenue by failing to pay taxes and other monies due. Yet such transactions are equally injurious to the development agenda of poor states. This essay argues that corruption should be redefined to encompass illicit financial flows, a term used by a growing network of tax and economic justice groups to refer to money that is “illegally earned, transferred or used.” Transactions such as trade misinvoicing, base-erosion, and abusive transfer pricing to illegally earn additional income undermine the ability of poor states to raise revenue for development. Expanding the definition of corruption would create a more realistic picture of the role of corporate actors and their involvement in corrupt and illicit dealings. It would also bring equivalency to the treatment of corporate actors and public officials. By focusing on illicit dealings involving corporate actors, this essay challenges the partial definition of corruption adopted in the heyday of the Washington Consensus, when skepticism about the role of the state, rather than of private actors, prevailed.

Since about 2008, the rise of autocracy and the decline of democracy has threatened the modern liberal international order. To counter the threat of authoritarian international law, the United States should collaborate with liberal democracies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to develop new plurilateral institutions and treaties to create a “liberal plurilateral order.” This Essay shows that states are planting the seeds of a future liberal plurilateral order in their response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

This Article challenges the conventional wisdom that states are always free to choose whether to participate in multilateral regimes. International law often mandates multilateralism to ensure that state laws and practices are compatible with sovereign equality and joint stewardship. The Article maps mandatory multilateralism's domain, defines its requirements, and examines its application to three controversies: the South China Sea dispute, the United States’ withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement, and Bolivia's case against Chile in the International Court of Justice.

The pages that follow embody the fruits of an examination of the work of the Permanent Court of International Justice as an interpreter of treaties. For sake of clearness and simplicity the pertinent cases are dealt with in a few familiar groups.

The tendency in recent world history toward the establishment of political parties based on class or racial ideologies in which no place of respect is given to established territorial boundaries has greatly intensified the problem of the responsibility of states in connection with international propaganda. Two main questions arise: (1) Are states themselves obliged under international law to refrain from spreading propaganda in a foreign country hostile to its government? and (2) Are they obliged to use due diligence to prevent private individuals and organizations from engaging in such activity? The purpose of this study is to seek the answer to these questions through an analysis of the sources of international law referred to in Article 38 of the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice: (a) international conventions, (b) diplomatic exchanges, giving evidence of international custom, (c) general principles embodied in municipal laws and judicial decisions, and (d) the attitude of writers on international law. Treatment of the subject will begin here with the period of the French Revolution and will be limited to peace-time political propaganda. The problem is, of course, much older and broader than these limits suggest, but it is believed that their extension would not contribute materially to the purpose at hand.