Over the past decade especially, many writers have emphasised the need for a broad approach to the subject of comparative law, thereby moving it beyond the “law as rules” approach of traditional legal doctrine. It is becoming steadily apparent that comparatists cannot limit themselves to simply comparing rules. The “law as rules” approach has to be placed in a much wider context Broader investigation reveals that it is not even rules which are at the core of the comparative endeavour; it is, rather, the legal discourse, the way lawyers work with the law and reason about it.

On 12 February 1930 a near-insolvent English company began arbitration proceedings against a large and hostile foreign State under an ad hoc arbitration clause contained in a written concession agreement signed by both parties. This concession had been granted by the Soviet Union in 1925 in respect of gold mining and other properties previously operated by the English company's Russian subsidiaries until their dispossession by the Soviet Russian government in 1918, following the October 1917 Revolution. In May 1930, after three months, the Soviet Union abruptly withdrew from the arbitration proceedings, abandoning both its defence and counterclaim and instructing its appointed arbitrator to take no further part in the proceedings. Four months later, on 2 September 1930, the English company obtained a massive monetary award in its favour, signed in London by two arbitrators only. Yet the financial result of Lena Gold-fields Limited v. USSR was to benefit David little and cost Goliath less.

Historically and conceptually, EU law originates in the idea that member States have approved restrictions of national sovereignty in the interests of establishing a common market. In accordance with this idea, significant elaboration or extension of these restrictions must also be approved by the member States or at least by a majority of their representatives in the Council of the Union. The implication is not only that the development of the rules of the common market is dependent on the will of the member States. The further implication is that the rules of the common market and the rules of Union decision-making are separable, in the sense that the latter rules are not affected by the former rules. While such implications are ill-adapted to the pluralist tendencies of integration processes, particularly the participation of third States (that is, non-member States) in these processes, they are confirmed by the formal structure of the EC Treaty.

A modern approach to private international law must deal adequately with three overall concerns. First, it must provide functional responses to the modern international context of trade and commerce in which cross-border problems arise. Second, it must provide effective and fair remedies in civil disputes when those disputes spill over national borders. Third, it must resolve the otherwise irreconcilable conflicts between national legal systems—not as an end in itself or solely as a means of finding comity among nations, but in order to do substantial justice between the private litigants involved. As Dicey had it in the choice of law context, this “does not arise from the desire of the sovereign of England or any other sovereign to show courtesy to other states. It flows from the impossibility of otherwise determining whole classes of cases without gross inconvenience and injustice to litigants, whether natives or foreigners.” It is the burden of this article to examine the way in which the English courts have sought to work out these three general functions in the context of developing rules that govern the ambit of interlocutory orders to disclose and trace the proceeds of fraud internationally. Having identified the problems of abuse presented by the new opportunities of the international banking system, the courts have been quick to innovate in developing new remedies. But just as quickly they have run up against the boundaries of such remedies, both in granting orders themselves and in reacting to foreign orders.

The right of peoples to self-determination is an elusive concept. There is no clear definition of “peoples” or of what the right entails. Instead, there are numerous and at times conflicting interpretations of self-determination. The existence of these various interpretations is not merely of academic or theoretical interest. It can have considerable practical implications.

Governments have traditionally tended to place procurement contracts with domestic industry and this may distort the natural patterns of international trade, creating inefficiencies in the global economy. As global, regional and bilateral initiatives have met with increasing success in reducing trade barriers such as quantitative restrictions and tariffs, greater attention is now being focused on the remaining barriers, including closed government procurement.

For most international travellers by air the Warsaw Convention, if it impinges on their consciousness at all, probably only raises a faint association with limitation of liability and with warning notices in various sizes of print on a passenger's ticket or ticket envelope. Only the most serious dearth of alternative reading, lack of airport facilities or unusual curiosity would be likely to induce an air traveller to read all the conditions and notices on the ticket.

The Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance entered into force on 8 June 1991. Its purpose is to incorporate into the law of Hong Kong the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“the ICCPR”) as applied to Hong Kong. Being one of the first occasions where the ICCPR has been given direct legal force in a common law jurisdiction, the Hong Kong experience will provide an interesting case study on how an international human rights instrument is received and interpreted in domestic law. Indeed, shortly after the coming into operation of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance, the late Professor Opsahl predicted that it would give the ICCPR, and by implication the Human Rights Committee, a potential impact on the Hong Kong domestic legal system which could hardly be expected in other countries. He even suggested that, in dealing with matters which the Human Rights Committee has not yet considered, the interpretation of the Hong Kong courts in applying the Bill of Rights may provide a useful supplement to international human rights law. The Bill of Rights Ordinance is now seven years old. This article will address two issues: first, the impact international and comparative jurisprudence has had on the interpretation of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights and, second, the contribution the Hong Kong jurisprudence on the Bill of Rights has or could have made to the development of international and comparative human rights law.

This article will propose that comparative law as a discipline should now consolidate itself as an independent subject with its own internal structure. This is not to say that its teachers and professors should abandon, or at least fully abandon, their “gift of freedom”.1 Nor is it to confuse comparative law with other more specific law subjects which may be taught in a comparative way.2 What this article will propose is that comparative law be envisaged as a subject basically operating at two levels (or consisting of two parts). At one level it consists of the now considerable literature on the subject, including of course the work which envisages the subject in terms of legal families. At another level, however, comparative law should be envisaged as being concerned with the theoretical underpinning of the terms “comparative” and “law”. This part, in other words, would deal with these terms as instruments of knowledge. What is it to have knowledge of “law”? And what contribution does “comparison” make to this epistemo-logical question?

Despite its Latin tag, forum non conveniens is far from a dry, legalistic issue. Indeed, it is fair to say that a highly emotional debate has raged on this topic in recent years, with accusations of “parochialism”, “naked and open chauvinism” and even outright racism on one side, and “chaotic transnational jurisprudence” and lack of clear guidance on the other.

Three are many reasons why a person may be reluctant to appear before a court as a witness. This article concerns the ability of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to compel witnesses to attend and also to answer questions when they are before the Tribunal. This second issue is more accurately represented as an ability to impose a sanction for the refusal to answer a question. This in turn raises the important question whether there are circumstances in which an individual may legitimately (i.e. without sanction) refuse to answer.

At the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the signature of the Treaty of Rome 1957 on 26 March 1997, Romano Prodi, President of the Italian Council, said that, with the Maastricht Treaty “we are perfecting our common economic constitution”, and that this Treaty should not be seen simply as an “instrument for the introduction of the single currency, but also as the awakening of the European peoples to the necessity of setting limits on the action of governments”. This notion of constitution or of economic constitution has received much attention from European legal scholars within the ongoing debate on constitutionalism and constitutionalisation within the Community legal order. However, constitutionalisation presents us with semantic difficulties, as legal doctrine has to adapt itself to the specificity of Community law. The discussion is further complicated by the divergence of views on the subject of whether the Treaties are a constitution for Europe and, indeed, whether Europe needs a constitution. Before we consider what constitutionalisation signifies, the notion of a constitution and an economic constitution in Community law merit consideration.

The use of terror to separate the ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a deeply tragic episode, with devastating effects on the lives of millions of people. Although the Dayton Agreement of December 1995 has brought a fragile peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina, it has done so at the cost of the division of its territory, its population and almost every aspect of civil life along ethnic lines. Two years into the peace process, the progress of return of refugees and displaced persons has been extremely disappointing. More than two million people—almost half the population—are still dispossessed of their homes. Some 600,000 of these are refugees abroad who have not yet found durable solutions, many of whom face the prospect of compulsory return into displacement within Bosnia and Herzegovina in the near future. Another 800,000 have been internally displaced to areas in the control of their own ethnic group, living in multiple occupancy situations, in collective centres or in property vacated by the displacement of others, often in situations of acute humanitarian concern. The fundamental issue for the future of the postwar society of Bosnia and Herzegovina is whether these people can or will return to their homes.

Over the last 30 years, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties1 has emerged as one of the most influential instruments of modern international law. The Convention, which was adopted at the UN Conference on the Law of Treaties on 23 May 1969, entered into force on 27 January 1980 and has meanwhile been ratified by more than 80 States.2 Yet, as it does not operate retroactively,3 the scope of application is growing only slowly and its practical importance stems, rather, from the fact that the Convention is widely considered a restatement of customary international law. As early as 1971 the International Court of Justice referred to the articles governing termination for breach of treaty as a codification of the existing law on the subject.4 Since then both international tribunals and national courts have more and more habitually relied on the material provisions of the Convention to ascertain traditional rules of the law of treaties.5

That humanitarian rules were applicable in armed conflicts was accepted long before the nineteenth century, but the fact that non-international armed conflicts were regarded as beyond the ambit of international regulation meant that the application of such norms to internal armed conflicts was certainly not a matter of course. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there had been a move towards the application of the laws of warfare to non-international armed conflicts as well as international conflicts, but this was based on the character of the conflicts and the fact that both were often of a similar magnitude, rather than any humanitarian concern to treat the victims of both equally. Not until the nineteenth century did the application of the laws of war to non-international armed conflicts become a widespread issue in international law.

More than 20 years after the measure was first proposed, the European Union has finally succeeded in adopting a directive designed to harmonise disparate national laws relating to the use of comparative advertising in the single market.1 In this article the authors examine the background, rationale and substance of the new legislation, before considering its impact on the current UK law. With a view to the possibility that implementation may contribute to the transatlantic harmonisation of advertising law, the new regime is measured against the liberal benchmark of US case law and recent Federal Trade Commission policy.

Within the past few years, the English Court of Appeal has ruled in a variety of cases involving disputes about the religious upbringing of children following the separation or divorce of their parents. Many of these cases have not been reported, although the most significant of them, Re R, is well known to family lawyers. In other jurisdictions the European Court of Human Rights in Hoffmann and the Supreme Court of Canada in Young and D.P. v. C.S. have also heard important cases in which a significant factor before the court was the influence of religious beliefs and practices on the children of those who professed them. This article is the result of a study of these and other cases from England, the United States and Canada in order to investigate the reasoning and the trends in judicial decision-making in cases involving children and religion.

[It] is not lawful for a doctor to administer a drug to his patient to bring about his death, even though that course is prompted by a humanitarian desire to end his suffering, however great that suffering may be … So to act is to cross the Rubicon which runs between on the one hand the care of the living patient and on the other hand euthanasia—actively causing his death to avoid suffering.

We are all aware that agriculture is important to developing countries as a source of income, employment and export earnings. To a far greater extent than in the OECD countries, agriculture it central to the economic performance of developing countries and the livelihood of their inhabitants. Rural societies in developing countries are directly dependent on the agricultural sector and urban dwellers rely on agriculture to provide food security and sustainable economic growth. Furthermore, many developing countries heavily rely on the export earnings or are highly dependent on food imports. Given the fact that the poorest and most threatened communities and countries are typically the most highly dependent, the resolution of pressing global agricultural policy and trade issues is critical to sustainable development and poverty alleviation.