The late Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper's most famous legislative initiative—the so-called Hickenlooper Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act—has been defused, if not actually repealed, by a single-sentence section contained in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1973. Although its “apparent demise” had been prophesied for some time, the suddenness with which Congress finally administered the coup de grâce stunned most foreign investment observers and probably accounts for their failure to have proper obituary notices ready.

The fallout from the 2010 Kampala Review Conference for the United States has been explained by Harold Koh and Todd Buchwald, who were officially involved in the negotiations at the conference. The concerns they enumerate serve to implicate, inter alia, two issues of broad importance for the international community: the definition of the crime of aggression, and the clear divide between the positions of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the rest of the Kampala participants with respect to the Councils role in implementing the Rome Statute’s new provisions on the crime of aggression. This Note, which focuses on those two issues, is partly a response to some of their criticisms and partly an independent assessment of the consequences of the Review Conference. It also evaluates the Kampala amendments to the Rome Statute’in particular, Articles 8 bis, 15 bis, and 15 ter—from the perspective of customary law and considers their impact on the role assigned to the Council under the UN Charter.

This conference, — the latest of the Hague Conferences to which the United States was a party, — was proposed by the United States on September 1, 1909, and convoked by the Netherlands Government on December 1, 1911. It dealt in a judicial manner with the varied and conflicting interests, diplomatic, moral, humanitarian and economic, of those governments represented and with the known similar interests of those not represented. Several of the governments in making pledges for the obliteration of the opium evil did so in the face of an eventual large financial sacrifice, but this was done thoughtfully and generously.

The conference determined upon and on January 23rd last signed a convention for the suppression of the obnoxious features of their national and of the international opium, morphine and cocaine traffics, and for the regulation of that part of the production of and trade in the drugs which may be said to be legitimate. To China was confirmed much that she had contended for for a hundred years or more as to the vexatious export of Indian opium to her shores. This act, however, was but a broader recognition of what the British Government had, as between India and China, already yielded to China by virtue of the so-called Ten Year Agreement of 1907, and by the modification of that agreement signed at Peking on the 8th of May, 1911.

In its Judgment of March 21, 1959, on the Preliminary Objections of the United States, the International Court of Justice held, by a vote of 9 to 6, that the Swiss application of October 2, 1957, requesting the Court to decide that the United States was under an obligation to restore the vested American assets of Interhandel or to submit the dispute to arbitration or conciliation, was inadmissible because Interhandel had not yet exhausted local remedies available in the United States courts.

“Law in general,” says Montesquieu, “is human reason so far as it controls all the people of the earth, and the political and civil laws of each nation can only be considered as individual cases in which this human reason is applied.” Reason was held by the Romans to constitute one of the fundamental elements of law. Cicero announced the existence of “a veritable law, true reason (recta ratio), in conformity with nature, universal, immutable and eternal, the commands of which constitute a call to duty and the prohibitions of which avert evil.”

It is at present unnecessary to consider what influence the Stoic, Academic and Epicurean doctrines had on Roman jurisprudence, and it would be risky to support as absolutely final any view which might be expressed on the subject. During the last phases of the Republic there had already come to exist in the world’s capital a fusion of the different schools of philosophy; and traces of the Platonic teachings constantly appear in the expression of the great orator’s lofty thought.

On September 28, 1945, the President of the United States issued two important proclamations and executive orders relating to the national exploitation of the resources of the continental shelf and the national regulation of contiguous fisheries. The claims therein made on behalf of the United States have important international repercussions. They also have an impact on the Constitutional question as to who, as between state and nation, controls these resources within and outside the three-mile limit.

Guidance of development in the British Commonwealth has involved the use of various legal means. In the field of international commercial relations perhaps none has been more striking than the adaptation of the familiar idea of most-favored-nation treatment.

One of the most frequently overstated concepts in American constitutional theory is the “separation” of powers. The Framers of the Constitution began with the proposition that concentration of power was to be avoided. They understood, on the other hand, that if governmental powers and responsibilities were actually set apart, each branch would exercise its powers in isolation from the other coordinate branches, to the detriment of cooperation and accommodation among them. Governance would be at best inefficient and at worst impossible.

The framework for the systematic registration and publication of international agreements on an intergovernmental level was set in Article 18 of the League of Nations Covenant, and later in Article 102 of the United Nations Charter. The purpose of treaty registration and publication is to give effect to the principle and policy of “open covenants”—enunciated as the first of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—in lieu of secret diplomacy. In addition, these procedures serve to record “contemporary trends in substantive international law” for the benefit of judicial and government practitioners, scholars, and specialists in various fields.