John Smith, an American citizen, is engaged in a profitable local business in a foreign country. He unexpectedly receives information from a reliable source that the people of the vicinity plan to attack and destroy his establishment within twenty-four hours. Smith at once imparts this information to the local authorities, who take no steps whatever to protect him. The threatened attack occurs and his business is either severely damaged or ruined. It is obvious that we have here a case for diplomatic representations. A foreigner residing in a friendly state has suffered injury to his property at the hands of the nationals of that state, under conditions where national responsibility attaches. The state of residence has failed to meet its international duty of taking adequate steps to afford the resident foreigner the protection of the local law; in other words, it has not been diligent in attempting to prevent the perpetration by its nationals of acts violative of the local law directed against the foreigner and resulting in injuries to his business interests.

Hardly another question is of greater practical interest in Latin America today, from the point of view of public order and national security, than the inadmission and expulsion of aliens. The question is specially deserving of reexamination in these days of revolutionary changes in political and legal thought, changes which suggest that legislation designed to safeguard the internal order and external security of a countryshould not be neglected lest it become powerless to cope with situations which those changes may carry in their wake. The historic events now taking place are in no small measure the symptoms of a profound transition in political and juristic ideas throughout the world.

On February 27, 1973, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics indicated its intention to accede to the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC). Soon thereafter, Soviet copyright legislation was substantially amended. Many of the consequences of Soviet accession to the UCC and of the new Soviet copyright legislation could be deduced immediately from the relevant provisions of Soviet and American law and the UCC itself. Nevertheless, many completely erroneous analyses of the legal significance of the Soviet action were published in the press of the United States and Western Europe. How the USSR would implement its copyright policy

The prompt adoption of the Charter of the United Nations by the United States stands in bold relief against the failure to ratify, the Covenant of the League of Nations twenty-five years ago. The causes responsible for the success of the Charter and the failure of the Covenant are probably diverse in character and varying in importance. The indorsement of the Charter by a virtually unanimous vote in the Senate was probably due in no small measure to the decision of the Roosevelt Administration to place the issue of American participation in an international security organization, almost from the very beginning, on a non-partisan basis. The issue, however, was not one of joining an international organization of the Woodrow Wilson type. The vote in the Senate, accordingly, does not necessarily represent a belated conversion to the idealism of Wilson. It would seem, on the contrary, that the Roosevelt Administration, drawing on the rich experience of international cöoperation during the interwar period, and more particularly during World War II, had taken care to keep from the Charter all the important matters to which the majority of the Senate, in voting on the Covenant with the Lodge Reservations on March 19, 1920, had taken exception. It may be that this policy was merely part of an over-all strategy aiming at bringing the United States into some sort of international security organization rather than running the risk of a repetition of the 1919/1920 drama. It may be, on the other hand, that the Roosevelt Administration, together with the other sponsoring governments, had become genuinely convinced that the League Covenant represented a type of international organization which, under the prevailing circumstances, was unattainable or undesirable or unworkable in practice.

The U.S.-led military operation in Haiti has unfolded with minimal violence and few casualties so far. That factual proposition—which is necessarily subject to revision—has important ramifications under both U.S. constitutional law and international law. On the constitutional level, the avoidance of hostilities defused what was poised to become a serious confrontation between the President and the Congress. On the international level, doubts in some quarters about the legitimacy of a forcible intervention, although not entirely allayed, were somewhat quieted with the achievement of a negotiated solution, which enabled U.S. troops to bring about the return to power of President Aristide without having to shoot their way into Haiti.

When President Barack Obama came into office in 2009 in the midst of serious, ongoing terrorist threats to the United States, he confronted important choices about how to approach the bodies of international law that regulate the resort to force and the conduct of armed conflict. By many accounts, the Bush administration had taken a maximalist approach to those bodies of international law, staking out broad substantive claims about what international law permitted in resorting to force and in detaining and treating members of Al Qaeda, and asserting those claims publicly and frequently.

The Obama administration has repeatedly taken a notably different tack, employing an approach that we might characterize as “executive minimalism.” That is, the Obama administration has signaled to other states its interest in self-constraint by making fewer bold substantive and rhetorical claims related to the jus ad bellum and jus in bello. It has pursued this objective partly by establishing various policies that authorize a narrower scope of action than what some believe international law permits. In particular contexts, it has also been more hesitant as a rhetorical matter to assert precise legal claims about what international law allows or where international law's limits lie. Accordingly, the Obama administration has sometimes taken action in the face of two (or more) possible legal theories without articulating its specific rationale.

In the making and conduct of foreign policy, Congress and the President have been rivalrous partners for 200 years. It is not hyperbole to call the current round of that relationship a crisis—the most serious constitutional crisis since President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. Roosevelt’s court-packing initiative was highly visible and the reaction to it was violent and widespread. It came to an abrupt and dramatic end, some said as the result of divine intervention, when Senator Joseph T. Robinson, the Senate Majority Leader, dropped dead on the floor of the Senate while defending the President’s bill. Everyone knew that Robinson hated the proposal, and was speaking for it only as a matter of political duty. The bill was discreetly buried shortly thereafter, the Court having meanwhile adjusted some of its doctrine to the prevailing winds. One Justice resigned.

In matters of foreign relations and national security, Presidents believe they know best, because they, alone, possess the information, advice and range of means to meet an imminent threat. It follows that when the judiciary or the Congress seeks to second-guess the exercise of what Chief Executives now are pleased to call the “foreign relations and national security power,” they are regarded as gratuitous intermeddlers. This is nowhere more tenaciously asserted by Presidents than in matters pertaining to the deployment of U.S. armed forces for combat abroad.

Domestic laws are shaped by myriad global governance projects, which may attract the support of different organizations, promote contrasting socioeconomic visions, and operate at diverse levels and scales. Beyond differences in their whos, whats, and wheres, governance projects are also differentiated by their hows: they may embody different ways of imagining relations between order, authority, and legitimacy; operate through different styles; or deploy different technologies. International legal regimes, which function through a logic of governance that applies norms sanctioned by the political consent of states, have long operated alongside “systems of management and control” drawing their legitimacy from claims of “objective, disinterested scientific knowledge.”