The questions presented to the Joint International Commission appointed under the terms of Articles VI and XV of the treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of Panama, ratified February 26, 1904, were of so unusual a character that a brief statement of the principles formulated by the Commission will probably be of interest to students of international law.

The adoption of the “Comprehensive Programme for the Further Extension and Improvement of Cooperation and the Development of Socialist Economic Integration by the CMEA Member-Countries,” to quote the document’s full title, opens a new chapter in the history of the self-styled “Socialist Commonwealth.” Two years on the drawing board, the 25,000-word encyclical is a strange mixture of ideological clichés, abstract formulations of political, economic, and juridical desiderata, projections of distant ends, references to proximate objectives, and elaborations of the concrete ways and means by which the next plateau on the road to the Communist millenium shall be reached. Approved at the 26th session of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) which met July 27-29, 1971, and subsequently ratified by the top political organs of the member states, the program enjoys locally the formal status of a multilateral treaty whose principles validly bind the CMEA partners to a general code of conduct aimed at achieving certain select goals by various designated methods. At the same time it represents a theoretical blueprint of how the leaderships of the countries concerned would like the region’s economic organism to perform in an optimal setting and how they propose to bring that situation about.

On two occasions in the recent past, the International Court of Justice has misstated its own prior holdings by selective quotation. In each instance, the partial quotation was invoked as authority for the opposite of what the previous Court had said. Neither matter was de minimis: in each instance, the issue for which authority was being sought was central either to the case at bar or to an important aspect of the Court’s role. The consequences for the future of international adjudication and the stability of authoritative expectation, which is such an important strut of international law, are serious and merit examination.

At the time this essay is being written (in mid-February), much is still not known about the system of military commissions contemplated by the president’s Military Order of November 13, 2001, and about the circumstances in which such commissions will be used. For example, it is not yet clear what offenses will be tried, what rules of evidence will be adopted, whether the defendants’ choice of counsel will be restricted, and whether defendants will be able to pursue ajudicial appeal of their conviction or a collateral challenge to their detention. Presumably, these points will be clarified by further orders or regulations from the executive branch.