Claimants, sole owners of capital stock in Pomeroy Corporation (Pomeroy), a Liberian corporation, filed a claim against respondent, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, before the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal for amounts allegedly due Pomeroy under a contract for the provision of planning, development and administrative services to the Iranian Navy. Respondent challenged the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, contending that claimants could not assert the contract rights of Pomeroy because it was not a national of the United States. In addition, respondent disputed the validity of the contract and, in the alternative, alleged that Pomeroy had breached the contract. Chamber Three rejected the jurisdictional challenge, holding, that since the claimants owned a controlling interest in the corporation, they indirectly owned the claims of the corporation. As U.S. nationals, they were proper parties to assert those claims before the Tribunal. The Chamber also held that a contract existed between the parties and awarded claimants amounts due for services rendered, an estimated amount for lost profits, and interest and costs.

When, on October 24, 1983, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California handed down its decision in Timberlane Lumber Co. v. Bank of America and denied U.S. jurisdiction out of regard for the Honduran “system of justice,” there may have been some surprise that the case was still pending. The Timberlane decision of 1976 of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which remanded the matter to the district court, had already become a classic, even though it was preceded by the 1968 decision in United States v. First National City Bank on the production of documents located abroad. The Timberlane approach outlined by Judge Choy, under which the exercise of antitrust jurisdiction has to be restrained by a case-by-case analysis of various factors, was widely discussed (and usually praised) in legal writing, and was also followed by federal courts of the Second, Third, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Circuits.

As a result of the conflict that broke out on April 2, 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, the United States (and some other countries) applied a number of coercive economic measures against Argentina, which had serious political and economic effects, as well as an impact on the outcome of the conflict.

On November 7, 1973, Congress overrode the veto of President Richard Nixon and enacted a law intended to “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of the United States Armed Forces into hostilities.” A war-making process that had too long been political, many legislators euphorically believed, had been made legal.

In the last two decades, there have been three major international adjudications on continental shelf boundaries between states. Three additional cases are now pending before international tribunals. Two concern continental shelf boundaries and the other, a single exclusive economic zone and continental shelf boundary. There is every reason to believe that more cases are on the way. During this period, many international agreements have been negotiated to settle similar international ocean boundary disputes. Nevertheless, the vast majority of such boundaries have yet to be resolved.

Claimant, Chas. T. Main International, Inc., filed a claim against respondent, Khuzestan Water & Power Authority, in the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal for amounts allegedly due under a contract for the provision of engineering and construction management services. Claimant contended that an exchange of documents and other conduct of the parties demonstrated the existence of a contractual relationship, despite respondent’s failure to sign a formal written agreement that had been drafted by claimant and allegedly approved by respondent. Respondent sought dismissal of the claim both on jurisdictional grounds and on the merits, contending that no contract existed since the respondent had never signed the formal agreement. In an interlocutory award, Chamber Two held: that respondent’s conduct, including the authorization and ratification of claimant’s services, demonstrated the existence of a contract, and that respondent’s refusal to pay for claimant’s services constituted a compensable breach of that contract. The Chamber further determined that the appointment of experts was necessary to ascertain the value of the services rendered.

Since President Truman claimed zones of extended coastal jurisdiction for the United States in September 1945, the delimitation of zones of national jurisdiction between states with opposite or adjacent coasts has become a major legal and political issue in international relations. The development of the concept of the continental shelf during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the claim to extended fisheries zones or exclusive economic zones by nearly all coastal states under the sway of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea since the mid-1970s, gave rise to delimitation problems all over the world. Similar problems may arise if more states extend their territorial seas to 12 nautical miles, which they may do under the new United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention) of 1982. By now, a considerable number of delimitation agreements have been concluded on the continental shelf and/or the territorial sea, and even agreements on the delimitation of fisheries zones have been reported.

Does the United Nations, in Saint Matthew’s words, “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel”? Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., a U.S. alternate delegate to the 38th United Nations General Assembly in 1983, spoke for many in and outside the U.S. Government when, after the end of the session, he charged in the New York Times that “[f]or decades, the United Nations has practiced a double standard.” Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick has elaborated the same point, accusing the Organization of being “perverted by politicization.”

Ever since the Antarctic regime began the third, crucial decade of its existence following the entry into effect of the Antarctic Treaty in 1961, interest in the frozen continent has escalated. This interest has spawned an immense social science literature, which analyzes the diverse legal, political and economic aspects of Antarctica and the surrounding oceans. The Antarctic regime has been universally and deservedly hailed both in the West and, especially, in the East as an unprecedented example of peaceful cooperation among states professing conflicting ideologies and, one might add, belonging to adversary alliances—as witnessed especially by the participation in the regime of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet much of the pertinent scholarly writing devotes primary or exclusive attention to the position of the United States within this regime; except for incidental references in some works, not one study has appeared anywhere that deals with the position of the Soviet Union on major substantive issues arising within the context of the Antarctic regime. This study will attempt to fill this gap by comprehensively examining the topic of Soviet participation in the affairs of the southern continent.

On November 5, 1982, the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal decided a series of nine cases presenting issues of the greatest significance for the future course of that Tribunal’s work. The issue for decision in each case was the effect of a contractual choice-of-forum clause on the Tribunal’s own jurisdiction, an issue likely to arise in a great many cases. Squarely presented were issues pertaining to the relationship between public and private international law, the content of a state’s obligation under international law to maintain an adequate and effective system of local remedies, and the scope of “changed circumstances” as a ground for release from contractual obligations.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) in December 1948. A representative of the United States signed the Convention, and President Truman later transmitted it to the Senate with a request that it give its advice and consent to ratification. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on the Convention in 1950. It has since held hearings on four occasions (1970, 1971, 1977 and 1981), and favorably reported the Convention to the Senate four times (1970, 1971, 1973 and 1976). However, the Senate has failed to act; a resolution of ratification was debated on the floor in 1973-1974, but it fell victim to a filibuster and the Convention remains in committee.

Writing in 1968, the year of the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Richard Bilder concluded that “in practice, a claim is an international human right if the United Nations General Assembly says it is.” Fifteen years later, as the 35th anniversary is celebrated, the authoritative role that Bilder correctly attributed to the General Assembly is in serious danger of being undermined.

On October 27, 1981, a Soviet submarine 137 surfaced in Swedish internal waters, well inside the military protection area of the naval base of Karlskrona. The submarine had grounded on a shoal and was unable to move without assistance. The Swedish Government refused a request from the USSR to salvage the ship itself and demanded that, in return for assistance by Swedish vessels, the commander submit to interrogation by Swedish authorities. The Soviet Union acceded to this by a formal agreement. The submarine was eventually escorted out of Swedish territorial waters.

Procedural law on the international plane, especially the law applicable to international judicial proceedings, has long tended to be the poor relation of substantive law. In particular, insufficient attention has often been paid to its sources, and to the manner in which it may be created; and confident assertions tending to confuse the Sollen with the Essen, lex lata with lex ferenda, have been made with a frequency not to be expected in other fields of international law. Hence the common temptation to model international procedural norms or rules on what are perceived to be analogous dispositions of municipal procedural law, without taking sufficient account either of the degree of generality, actual or potential, of the municipal law rule, or of the accuracy of the analogy involved in its transfer to the international plane.

More than 30 years after the end of hostilities in the Second World War, 13 governments have confirmed the presence on their territories of large amounts of the material remnants of war, mostly land mines. They can be found in all the countries affected by the North African campaign of the Axis powers in 1940-1943, namely, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, as well as in Malta, Norway, Poland and even Australia. Armed conflicts that have taken place at a later time, for example, those in Vietnam, the Suez Canal Zone, the Sinai and other regions in the Near East, have created similar dangers, and there is no reason to believe that present and future conflicts will be any different.

Namibia, a territory in southwest Africa adjacent in the west to South Africa and Botswana, derives its notoriety from the fact that its history is a major component of the history and oppression of South African apartheid. But for this fact, the current guerrilla warfare there would perhaps be dismissed as another obscure conflict in some distant land. Few persons on the outside would know about it in detail, and absent special circumstances overtly involving the superpowers or some spreading of the war, fewer still would care.