On April 6, 1955, during its thirty-fourth year, the International Court of Justice decided one case brought on December 17, 1951, by Liechtenstein against Guatemala—the Nottebohm Case—in favor of Guatemala. It also gave an Advisory Opinion to the General Assembly of the United Nations on June 7, 1955, on the Voting Procedure on Questions relating to Reports and Petitions concerning the Territory of South-West Africa.

So great has been the progress of the inter-American regional system over the past fifty years that it is difficult for a later generation to understand how hesitant and faltering the statesmen of an earlier day could have been in their approach to problems for which we have now found, if not the solution, at least the basis upon which to construct a solution. States were sovereign then, and sovereignty, as the term was practically applied, meant that states were not so much above the law but rather outside its scope in respect to the fundamental and recurrent issue of the defense of national interests.

During critical phases in the development of a legal system the quality of the craftsmanship which practitioners of the law bring to its service can have a decisive influence on the process of development and on the whole texture of the legal system resulting from that process of development. So it was when the great civilians transformed the law of an overgrown city state into the law of an imperial commonwealth; so it was when the glossators laid the foundations of the modern civil law; so it was when the Bench and Bar of England created the common law; so it is today in the case of international law.

In the Memorandum signed at Moscow, on April 15, 1955,1 the Austrian and Soviet Delegations came to an agreement binding the Austrian Delegation to carry out the following decisions and measures:

1. Referring to the declaration made at the conference of Berlin in 1954 neither to join a military alliance nor to allow foreign military bases in its territory, the Austrian Government will make a declaration in a form which will obligate Austria internationally to practice in perpetuity a neutrality of the type maintained by Switzerland.

2. After having ratified the State Treaty, the Austrian Government will submit this declaration to the Austrian Parliament for confirmation according to the Austrian Federal Constitution.

3. The Austrian Government will take all suitable steps to obtain international recognition of this declaration.

4. The Austrian Government will welcome a guaranty by the four Powers of the independence and territorial integrity of Austria.

5. The Austrian Government will seek to obtain from the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States of America such a guaranty.

The enduring value of Chief Justice John Marshall’s contributions to international law is shown by the fact that during the bicentennial year of his birth the Supreme Court of the United States has had occasion in the course of current litigation to apply principles set forth in well-known decisions rendered by Marshall more than a century ago. Likewise there is timeliness, in view of current interest in “treaty law,” in Marshall’s pronouncements on that topic.

In recent years, increased attention has been focused on international conflicts of interest with respect to international rivers of the Middle Bast. The creation of new political units in the area after the first World War, their attainment of independence, and the creation of new states in the years following the second World War, fragmented the areas irrigated by most of the Middle East’s rivers.