As the United Nations system approaches its fiftieth anniversary, there is good reason to take a fresh view of its contribution to legal order in the contemporary world. That contribution has rarely been assessed in its full generality. A half century of law creation and application by the United Nations and its specialized agencies has produced a corpus juris of impressive breadth and diversity. Not surprisingly, the greater part of this law is known only to those specially concerned with a particular area or subject. Indeed, no one can be expected to be knowledgeable in all, or even most, of the fields covered. Still, along with the diversity, common elements can be found to enable us to characterize the total product as a distinctive, multilayered legal order. This essay is an overview of its essential and interesting features. It aims particularly at informing the many nonspecialists in and outside the international law community who have reason to be interested in the process and substance of the legal contribution of the UN system.

United States Secretary of State George Marshall told the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 that “[g]overnments which systematically disregarded the rights of their own people were not likely to respect the rights of other nations and other people, and were likely to seek their objectives by coercion and force in the international field.”

Judgments of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and awards of ad hoc arbitration tribunals carry special weight in international maritime boundary law. On its face, the international maritime boundary law codified in the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea is indeterminate. For the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zone, the legal obligation of coastal states is to delimit the boundary “by agreement on the basis of international law, as referred to in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, in order to achieve an equitable solution.” The article on the delimitation of maritime boundaries in the territorial sea is no more determinative despite the fact that it makes direct references to the equidistant line, special circumstances and historic title. In spite of this indeterminacy, if not because of it, coastal states have found that third-party dispute settlement procedures can effectively resolve maritime boundary delimitation disputes. As a consequence, there are more judgments and awards on maritime boundary disputes than on any other subject of international law, and this trend is continuing.

It has been thirty years since the publication of Professor G. C. Christie’s well-known analysis of the state of international law on this question and ten years since the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal began to render awards on whether takings had occurred that required compensation under international law. Nearly fifty awards have included decisions on such claims, a number that constitutes a massive addition to the decisions of international tribunals on this subject. Only a few of the claims based upon alleged takings of property remain to be heard. In these circumstances, it seems appropriate to review the relevant decisions for the purpose of identifying the factors cited by the Tribunal in support of its findings that an alleged taking had or had not occurred.

The new Russian Constitution, which was approved by a popular referendum on December 12, 1993, entered into force on December 25, 1993. From a broad political perspective, the 1993 Constitution signifies a complete departure from the Communist dictatorship and a passage to democratic government. As a new basic law for a “democratic federal legal state,” the Constitution became an important step toward the establishment of a Rechtsstaat in Russia.

At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, governments decided to cooperate “in an expeditious and more determined manner” to develop international law regarding liability and compensation for transnational environmental damage. UNCED, however, did not decide whether this development should proceed broadly through codification of principles or rules encompassing all types of transnational environmental damage or more narrowly through the establishment of liability and compensation regimes tailored to specific issues of environmental damage.

Nongovernmental organizations are playing an increasingly important role in international litigation. This study will analyze the participation of nongovernmental organizations, primarily as amici curiae, in the proceedings of four permanent international courts: the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. After discussing the impact of amici in national and regional courts, it recommends that the International Court of Justice expand its acceptance of submissions from nongovernmental organizations in appropriate cases. The Court has a jurisdictional basis to do so and amici have usefully contributed to cases before other courts.

The decision of the United States Supreme Court in Republic of Argentina v. Weltover, Inc. is an invitation to reassess the impact of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) upon public debt litigation. In contrast with other activities of foreign states, which have been the object of extensive and continuing litigation, barely two dozen cases involving public debt disputes have been reported since the FSIA took effect. Whether this situation is attributable to the care with which transnational loan documents are usually drafted or to some other reasons, including possibly the contemporary tendency to rely on debt rescheduling as a means of remedying difficult situations, is an interesting matter of speculation. Whatever the explanation for the relatively limited number of public debt cases, Weltover can be expected to have a decisive impact upon future litigation.

For more than two decades, historians of the United States have energetically debated the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism in the 1770s and 1780s. Was the late eighteenth century a time of progress, and events culminating in the ratification of the Constitution a triumph for individual rights and liberal society, as convention held? Or was it a time of decay, and the events of the founding a renewal of citizen virtue in defense of the common good? Political theorists and constitutional scholars joined the debate, extending it beyond the founding and noting its relevance to our own time. Everyone agreed that liberalism eventually prevailed, more or less completely, for better or for worse. Just when it did so, and why, were questions always asked but never satisfactorily answered as the debate ran its course.

The relationship between the International Court of Justice and the Security Council may be approached from the perspective of the United Nations Charter and the way it delimits competences between two principal UN organs and regulates the exercise of their concurrent powers. The Court, however, has a dual, ambivalent role. It is not only the principal judicial organ of the United Nations under Article 92 of the Charter; it is also an autonomous adjudicative body with the function, under Article 38 of its Statute, of applying international law to such disputes between states as are brought before it. Viewed in the light of Questions of Interpretation and Application of the 1971 Montreal Convention Arising from the Aerial Incident at Lockerbie, the relationship between the judicial and political organs raises some fundamental questions of general international law that go beyond UN constitutional issues.

In June 1994, some twelve years after the conclusion of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, the UN Secretary-General reported to the General Assembly that informal consultations had led to agreements that appeared to have removed the obstacles to general adherence to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.