The late Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper's most famous legislative initiative—the so-called Hickenlooper Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act—has been defused, if not actually repealed, by a single-sentence section contained in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1973. Although its “apparent demise” had been prophesied for some time, the suddenness with which Congress finally administered the coup de grâce stunned most foreign investment observers and probably accounts for their failure to have proper obituary notices ready.

A conspicuous feature of current demands for a more equitable economic order is the idea of “just prices” or more broadly a just relationship of prices. Although the conception of a just price goes back to medieval philosophy, it has not acquired a generally accepted meaning in either economic or juridical thought and it certainly cannot be regarded as a technical term of art in international economic relations. Yet there is no doubt that the concept of the just price (as well as the closely related notion of a just relationship of prices) expresses political demands that are of considerable importance in the development of new international legal and institutional arrangements. It is particularly interesting to note that the concept which has long played a leading role in the grievances of the poor countries has recently received emphasis in the statements of spokesmen for the industrialized countries faced with the soaring prices of oil and minerals. The idea of linking justice to prices may seem to some to be a vain effort to mingle ethical and economic factors (possibly with overtones of medieval metaphysics) but the political realities cannot be wished away and the demands for fairness and equity in international pricing will have to be faced.

In a series of newspaper columns and stories beginning March 19, 1975 the American public was told apparently correctly about the partial success of the Central Intelligence Agency in raising a Soviet submarine, its equipment, and dead crew from the Pacific Ocean floor. The location of the pertinent activities was reported to be well beyond any state's claim to territorial waters, continental shelves, contiguous zones, or other asserted inhibiting zones. The CIA vessel, The Glomar Explorer, was disguised as a commercially operated oceanographic research vessel. No international legal implications seem to have been perceived by the newspapers in the American intelligence activities.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the United States Department of State.