Alan Sykes’ editorial comment, Economic “Necessity” in International Law, provides a multi-layered analysis of the defense of “necessity” in international investment disputes. Sykes’ main proposition is that the obligation to compensate investors for government measures prejudicing their investments during economic emergencies mitigates the risk of moral hazard and incentivizes States to “select the least expensive way to protect their interests (the optimal policy instrument).” Otherwise, he contends, “actors will take risks that imperil them to an excessive degree if they can save themselves by imposing costs on others.” Sykes nonetheless argues that payment of the compensation could be deferred in light of the emergency, and not be subject to market interest rates.

The negotiators and drafters of the Agreement establishing the World Trade Organization(WTO), which includes the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1947(GATT) and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade(TBT), as well as other subagreements dealing with domestic regulation, such as the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures(SPS), did not do a great job of doctrinal integration among the different documents that comprise the WTO Agreement. To be fair, at the end of the Uruguay Round, the hour was late and they may have felt that the basic ideas were sufficiently clear that it could all be sorted out in litigation. But in several contexts, including within the original GATT, the text of which dates from 1947, they covered the same ground in multiple places, without stating clearly how the different norms relate to one another,and without articulating plausible reasons for different treatment. For example, why is different language used for national treatment in three different places within Article III of GATT, and why is that language different from the language that appearsto have the same purpose in the TBT Agreement or in the SPS Agreement?

Bond v. United States had long been anticipated as the case in which the Supreme Court would revisit Missouri v. Holland (1920) and limit Congress’s authority to implement treaties. In the event, the Court did nothing of the kind. Only three Justices would have recognized judicially enforceable limits on the Treaty Power (Thomas, joined by Scalia and Alito, concurring in the judgment), and only two would have adopted the crabbed reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause advocated by Professor Nicholas Rosenkranz (Scalia, joined by Thomas, concurring in the judgment).

No branch of international law has been so badly misunderstood and needlessly confused as that of the recognition of new states and new governments. Recognition has been the football of diplomats who have made it mean anything that suited their purpose. It has certainly been grossly abused as a weapon of diplomatic pressure and intervention. It has in many cases proved to be an insoluble puzzle to the courts whose decisions have been sometimes conflicting and confusing. It has been a plaything for the political scientists who have taken delight in posing abstract problems of a theoretical nature.

International organizations (IOs) provide space for the exchange of ideas. Particularly since the Cold War ended, many expected that this exchange would inevitably lead to more democratization and liberalization around the globe. Instead, some of the largest non-democratic actors on the global stage have functioned within these organizations for decades without liberalizing, while others joined as full or newly transitioned democracies just to see those qualities slowly erode. As Tom Ginsburg's recent article concludes, today's autocrats might instead use international law—including the legal apparatus of IOs—to further their own authoritarian agendas. This essay engages with Ginsburg's thoughtful piece by suggesting that IOs both enable and resist the emergence of “Authoritarian International Law” (AIL). Creating or joining IOs is a costly but attractive strategy for revisionist states since members equally influence IO evolution. Fortunately for democracy's advocates, IOs are usually status quo entities, and liberalism is deeply embedded in many existing today. Cross-temporal observations of changes in IO membership, members’ regime types, and IO features beyond the founding documents are needed to fully understand how organizations simultaneously perform these paradoxical functions.

The Australian proclamations of September 10, 1953, claiming the continental shelf adjacent to the coasts of the Commonwealth and its Territories are interesting in several respects. They depart as to form from the British practice, and so suggest that the United Kingdom drafts have been found by the advisers to the Australian Government to be inadequate; they attempt for the first time to establish a specific relationship between the shelf and sedentary fisheries; and they raise the novel and yet important question of the competence of an Administering Power to extend the boundaries of a Trust Territory. The proclamations were issued only after careful consideration of previous claims and the academic controversies they have generated, and one may conclude from the text that, since the International Law Commission reported on the subject, the concept of the continental shelf and the character of the rights asserted in respect of it have crystallized, and that a definite pattern has now been set for future development of the law.

Many recent comments have been made with respect to the wisdom of Congress in passing the Act of September 22,1922, entitled, “ An act relative to the naturalization and citizenship of married women, ” commonly known as the Cable Act, and which granted a form of independent citizenship to women.1 Among these comments we find the phrase, “ probably accidental reasons,” and an expressed sentiment that it is “ questionable whether the majority of the women of this country really wanted the new law, ” and simi- ‘lar suggestions. It has been intimated that the law was passed solely as the result of the persuasive efforts of a minority of women.2 In many instances little cognizance has been taken of the reasons for, and the actual facts involved in, the change.