At the beginning of the 14th century, the great poet Dante published an imaginative proposal for world order. His experience had led him to believe that the multiplicity of cities, states, and kingdoms was the source of great discord and strife. They were depriving mankind of that tranquility which was necessary for the full development of its intellectual powers. There was a need for a single impartial ruler who, standing above the contentiousness of lesser governments, could bring about a regime of universal justice and peace. In the De monarchia the holder of universal authority was to be the Roman emperor. The genius of the Romans devised the most effective forms of government that the world had ever known. As the Roman Catholic Church had universal authority in matters spiritual, the Holy Roman emperor should exercise a supreme, global authority to which all the various kingdoms and republics would be politically subordinate.

The tenth session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea met in New York from March 9 to April 24, 1981 and resumed in Geneva from August 3 to August 28, 1981. The Drafting Committee and its organs also met from January 12 to February 27 in New York and from June 29 to July 31 in Geneva.

On May 12, 1981, the President of the International Court of Justice ordered the discontinuance of the Case concerning United States Diplomatic and Consular Staff in Tehran (United States of America v. Iran) (Hostages case). Following the indication of provisional measures in December 1979 and the Judgment in May 1980, the present Order ended the proceedings in the case. This is the first order to apply the (Revised) Rules of Court of 1978 concerning the discontinuance of proceedings. It therefore appears to be an appropriate time to comment on this topic of international procedure.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has drafted its Statute, adopted its Rules of Procedure, negotiated its headquarters agreement, and so far dealt with its first case. It is timely, therefore, to describe the Court’s institutional framework and to analyze its jurisdiction. A more extensive study, of course, will have to await its developing case law.

In the United States, with its government of separated powers and functions, it is the executive branch, and in particular the Department of State, that bears responsibility for implementing legislation on foreign relations. The success of implementation will depend on political decisions, involving competing national interests, as well as on institutional and personal considerations of the officials concerned. Inevitably, there is a gap between legislation and execution, especially when the Executive is not wholly sympathetic to the law. The gap may even devour legislated policies as the Executive refuses "to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," and bureaucratic and personal considerations distort judgments, exploit the generality and uncertainty of language, and lead to abuse of discretion. A notable instance of this problem has been executive implementation of legislation on international human rights.

The coming into force for the United States and other nations of a law of the sea treaty may affect fishery management in the United States under the Fishery Conservation and Management Act (FCMA) in a number of different ways. This discussion examines some possible ways and focuses particularly upon possible incompatible provisions in terms of the objectives of fishery management, subsidiary standards for management, conservation and allocation measures, the species within United States authority, the allocation of fishery management authority between state and federal governments, transboundary stocks and high seas/fishery zone stocks, enforcement authority and activity, and lastly, the amendment of regulations adopted under the FCMA to conform to the LOS treaty.

The “Hostages” case was surely one of the most remarkable ever to be presented to the World Court for a decision. And among its remarkable features, none is more striking than that prior to delivery of the Court’s Judgment the United States attempted to rescue the hostages by force. This attempt to accomplish by force what the United States had sought to achieve through the judicial process raised profound issues regarding the relationship between the use of force and adjudication, the purpose and effect of interim measures of protection, and the role of the Court in the contemporary international order. This article will analyze these issues in the light of the Court’s treatment of the rescue attempt.

A suit cannot be pressed, whether on the domestic or international level, without supporting evidence. The processes of gathering such evidence are carefully regulated in many developed legal systems, in part because experience has shown that too zealous a pursuit of evidence can easily transform institutions designed to resolve conflict into a rationalization and a setting for possibly even more rancorous conflict. When some part of the state apparatus is prosecuting a case, liberal democracies have often imposed more stringent regulations as part of what we may call, in a nondocumentary sense, the “constitutional” or “rule of law” tradition, that continuing compact between governors and governed about restraint in the use of official power.

Historically, public international law and private international law have been treated as two different legal systems that function more or less independently. Public international law regulates activity among human beings operating in groups called, nation-states, while private international law regulates the activities of smaller subgroups or of individuals as they interact with each other. Since the public international legal system coordinates the interaction of collective human interests through decentralized mechanisms and private international law coordinates the interaction of individual or subgroup interests primarily through centralized mechanisms, these coordinating functions are usually carried out in different forums, each appropriate to the task. The differences between the processes by which sanctions for violation of community norms are applied in the two systems and the differences in the nature of the units making up the communities that establish those norms tend to obscure the fact that both the public and the private international systems coordinate human behavior, and that thus the values that inform both systems must necessarily be the same.

One of the characteristic phenomena of contemporary international life is the proliferation of human rights instruments and systems of supervision. In addition to the Charter of the United Nations and comprehensive global conventions such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Economic Covenant) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Political Covenant), instruments have been adopted within the United Nations or the specialized agencies to govern particular aspects of human rights (e.g., racial discrimination, rights of women) and within regional organizations (e.g., the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States) to govern both general and particular aspects of human rights. In the United Nations, the general practice has been for each normative instrument to create its own system of supervision whenever such systems have been established. Typically, each organ of supervision applies only the norms adopted in the specific “founding” instrument, rather than the entire corpus juris of international human rights or even all of the instruments comprising the International Bill of Human Rights, i.e., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Universal Declaration), the Economic Covenant, the Political Covenant, and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This proliferation of normative instruments and systems of supervision, which is similar to the proliferation that has given rise to difficult questions of coordination within and between international organizations in the fields of budget, programming, and administration, has led to overlapping jurisdiction and even to conflicts between the legislative and supervisory competence, or claims of competence, of various international bodies. The object of this article is not to compile or map out all the possible conflict areas or to undertake a detailed analysis of the conflicts, whether real or imaginary. Its more modest purpose is to present a broad panorama of the problems, directions, and policy. These matters merit attention, even though political and institutional reasons may make major reforms impossible for the time being. The questions to be discussed are relevant to three major fields of international law: treaties, human rights, and international organizations. While substantive problems of “legislation” or norm making are closely related to problems of supervision or implementation, normative problems will be focused upon first, and problems of supervision second.

The Gulf of Aqaba is a long, narrow body of water on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula. The western shore is Egyptian, the eastern shore is Saudi Arabian, and the head of the Gulf is Israeli and Jordanian territory. The islands of Tiran and Sanafir front the entrance and have been under Egyptian occupation since 1950. Saudi Arabia, however, maintains the claim that the two islands are Saudi Arabian territory. The length of the Gulf is about 96 miles; the breadth at the entrance to the Gulf is 5¾ miles; at its widest the Gulf measures 14½ miles. The entrance to the Gulf is through the Strait of Tiran (about 3 miles wide), between Tiran Island and the Egyptian coast. There are two passages in the Strait; Enterprise Passage and Grafton Passage, 1,300 and 950 yards wide, respectively. Enterprise Passage, which lies close to the Sinai Peninsula coast, is the principal navigation channel into the Gulf, and the only channel that can be navigated safely by vessels of substantial size. On the coastline, Egypt and Saudi Arabia each have over 100 miles of territory; also Jordanian territory encompasses about 3½ miles and the territory of Israel about 6 miles.

The orbit/spectrum resource is one of the world’s most important reservoirs of value. This resource has a dual “orbit/spectrum” nature because its value can only be realized through the simultaneous exploitation of both the geostationary orbit and the electromagnetic spectrum. The geostationary orbit, a ring of space six earth radii above the equator, is where a communications satellite must be placed in order to assume a fixed position in the sky. These fixed or “geostationary” positions are extremely desirable because they allow the satellite to serve as a dependable relay platform for messages sent between large numbers of geographically isolated communicators.

International law needs to respond to the dual pressures for change brought on by rapid technological development and the promulgation of the “New International Economic Order.” While a number of major international negotiations have been mounted in recent years to respond to these pressures, all of them have failed to meet expectations. The value of international law in shaping and stabilizing international behavior will certainly diminish unless the performance of these international negotiations is improved or other methods for effectuating change are found. It is the purpose of this article to explore some of the procedures that the international community has used to respond to these pressures and to suggest areas for improvement or further exploration.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (the Convention), concluded on May 23, 1969, entered into force on January 27, 1980. It thus took more than 10 years for 35 states to ratify the instrument or to accede to it. Although its entry into force may hasten ratification and accession somewhat in other states, it will probably be a very long time before a large majority of states are parties to the Convention. Therefore, international treaty practice will long be faced with the conclusion of treaties between or among states that are parties to the Convention and other states.

The delimitation of maritime boundaries is one of the major areas of ocean law where disputes between countries occur with frequency and where the development of governing principles of law remains difficult. At the Law of the Sea Conference, delimitation of the continental shelf and economic zones between states with opposite or adjacent coasts was one of the last issues to be resolved. Major judicial and arbitral decisions, such as the North Sea Continental Shelf cases before the International Court of Justice and the Anglo-French Continental Shelf arbitration, have gone some way to developing a body of relevant law to assist states in the solution of their maritime boundary problems. These decisions have clarified some of the relevant factors that states should take into account, but major boundary problems remain. On the Aegean Sea, Greece and Turkey have still not reached any solution; relations between Canada and the United States have been severely strained by their slow progress on maritime boundary issues; Libya and Tunisia have referred their continental shelf dispute to the International Court of Justice.

Despite the increasing significance of customary law in the delimitation of sea boundaries between states, the principles that evolved during the three centuries prior to World War II have generally been ignored. Although a comprehensive study in this field is needed, the studies that exist begin either with the Truman Proclamation of 1945 or the discussions of the International Law Commission in the early 1950’s. The Commission itself declared that there was no law on the matter and attempted to legislate rules in the interest of the progressive development of international law. This hasty and ambitious attempt left a gap between the conventional law and customary law, which later resulted in many disputes.

In the late 18th and 19th, and the early 20th centuries invaluable contributions were made by lawyers to the establishment of international law in the United States. Their contributions took various forms, but all helped establish, clarify, or disseminate understanding of this branch of the law. Because of the ways international law develops, these people ranged from statesmen who established practices and doctrines in the international field that ultimately became the law, to those who participated in the development of important treaties and international agreements; and from judges who rendered significant decisions on points of international law, to scholars and others who were responsible for the gradual evolution of education and literature in the field.

The framework for the systematic registration and publication of international agreements on an intergovernmental level was set in Article 18 of the League of Nations Covenant, and later in Article 102 of the United Nations Charter. The purpose of treaty registration and publication is to give effect to the principle and policy of “open covenants”—enunciated as the first of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—in lieu of secret diplomacy. In addition, these procedures serve to record “contemporary trends in substantive international law” for the benefit of judicial and government practitioners, scholars, and specialists in various fields.