Elsewhere in this issue the Geneva Conference on the Law of the Sea is fully described, and it is unnecessary here to repeat the facts which have been stated by Mr. Arthur H. Dean and Miss Marjorie M. Whiteman. This comment concerns itself with the methods and procedures which were utilized in what was distinctly an exercise in international law-making.

As Thurman Arnold pointed out some years ago in Symbols of Government, those who attack either men or institutions on counts of irrationality or ineffectiveness are immediately met by the rejection-reactions of those attacked.

The Convention on the Continental Shelf, adopted at Geneva on April 26, 1958, by the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, represents the first great effort to determine by an act of international legislation the scope of the continental shelf doctrine in international law. The fact that the Convention was finally approved by a vote of 57 to three, with only eight abstentions, is evidence both that a need for rules on the subject was generally felt and that the rules embodied in the Convention were considered on the whole acceptable.

On October 1, 1957, the General Assembly of the United Nations decided without objection to inscribe on the agenda of its twelfth session a proposal of the Soviet Union requesting a declaration relative to the principles of peaceful co-existence.

The Advisory Committee on the Foreign Relations of the United States was appointed at the request of the Chief of the Historical Division of the Department of State.

Once again the attention of students of international law and relations has been directed to the use of propaganda as an offensive weapon of power politics. President Eisenhower, in his historic speech last August before the United Nations, included in his comprehensive plan for the Middle East a proposal for a system of monitoring inflammatory broadcasts.

The approval of the Alaskan statehood bill by the 1958 session of the United States Congress focuses new attention on the increasing penetration of the high northern latitudes. But Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Soviet Union, as well as the United States, have long been active in this frontier region.

In 1951 the first Hispano-Luso-American Congress took place at Madrid. There was also created the Hispano-Luso-American Institute of International Law.

The Institute of International Law has announced the subject for the Samuel Pufendorf Prize (1200 Swiss francs) to be awarded in 1960. The subject chosen is: ’The Position of Third States with Regard to the European Coal and Steel Community.”

The 53rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law will take place at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D. C, from April 30 to May 2, 1959.