The increasing frequency of arbitration and the pressure for a regular court of international justice composed of permanent judges, have given new emphasis to the demand for what is called the codification of international law.

The process and the result intended to be described when the term codification is applied to international law involves something very different from the codification of municipal law. The codifier of any part of the law of a nation finds the law with which he is to deal already in existence and authenticated. It may be confused in form and apparently unrelated in its parts: it may be scattered through the statutory enactments of many years and the declarations of a multitude of judicial decisions; the codifier may have to struggle with difficult questions of apparent inconsistency, of doubtful repeal, of obscurities in expression calling for interpretation and construction, and with conflicts of judicial opinion; but the expressions which he considers all come from the same law-making power. Somewhere in the mass of material is to be found the final expression of legislative will, the controlling decision of the courts, and when these are found everything inconsistent with them may be rejected as repealed or overruled. The codifier's task is to find what the rules really are; to put them in due relations to each other under appropriate heads in accordance with some systematic scheme of arrangement; to bring order out of confusion; to furnish a methodical statement of the results of his researches which may make the law plain to the people who live under it and may relieve countless lawyers from the necessity of going through the same wearisome process of inquiry in each separate case. When the work is complete, if it is acceptable, the legislative power of the state puts its stamp of approval upon it and resolves any doubts or uncertainties by its acceptance of the codifier’s conclusions. It may indeed be that the research of the codifier and the clearer view presented by a systematic arrangement will have revealed inadequacies of expression, incongruities, and omissions in the existing law, but, as to these, the suggestions of the codifier for remedying the defects discovered will be accepted or rejected by the single fiat of the legislative body which enacts the code.