Sir Harold Nicholson had it about right. Diplomacy, he said,

Investment disputes have attracted their fair share of missionaries, fanatics, and lawyers in the Western Hemisphere. There may be evidence, though, that some relatively reasonable sceptics are making their voices heard.

Expropriations in the later 1970’s often proceed more suavely than in the past. Straightforward seizure, to be sure, still has devotees. However, an increasingly favored approach is to induce the foreign investor to convey his property (or an interest therein) by an instrument that on its face represents an ordinary sale. That sale may be accompanied by a revision of the terms of some underlying contract between the investor and the government. The purpose of this article is to explore whether any body of rules now exists setting limits to the means that a government can use to obtain the investor’s consent. It then asks whether that law could be further developed so as to improve the quality of such negotiations and to cause them to produce more equitable results. Thereby it would indirectly improve the security and efficiency of the whole process of foreign direct investment.

Recent events in Angola and Rhodesia have drawn public attention to the problems which arise from the use of mercenaries in armed conflicts and civil wars. Renewed interest in the subject has also been shown by international bodies and conferences, including the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, which recently adopted a treaty article on the status of mercenaries. This article examines the international legal rules applicable to states in relation to the recruitment and organizing of mercenary forces, the appropriate domestic legislation to give effect to such rules, and the status to be accorded mercenaries for the purposes of the laws of war.

The sixth session of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea was held in New York from May 23 to July 15, 1977.

The Conference confirmed two procedural decisions taken at the close of the fifth sesison—to devote the first two or three weeks of the sixth session to Committee I (deep seabed) problems and to entrust the President and Committee Chairmen with the preparation of an informal composite text of the treaty as a whole later in the session. In the interim between the fifth and sixth sessions, Minister Jens Evensen of Norway, Vice-President of the Conference, who at an earlier stage of the Conference had held lengthy informal meetings on economic zone matters with marked success, arranged for an intersessional meeting in Geneva early in 1977 on the deep seabeds sytem of exploitation, to which all conference participants were invited. Minister Evensen continued these efforts at the Conference itself, reporting to the Chairman of the First Committee.

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 Department of State.