The quest for a hierarchy of international human rights continues unabated, despite the impressive challenge raised by Professor Weil to the notion of “relative normativity” of international legal norms. To illustrate: in Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, a suit brought under the (First) Judiciary Act of 1789, Judge Harry T. Edwards discussed whether torture, as distinguished from terrorism, “is among the handful of crimes to which the law of nations attributes individual [civil] responsibility.”

The International Tin Agreement (ITA), one of the world’s oldest commodity pacts, ran out of money and discontinued its market support operations on October 24, 1985. Subsequent disclosures revealed that the organization not only had exhausted its cash reserves but also had borrowed over £900 million in an unsuccessful effort to support the price of tin. Member governments of the ITA failed to approve additional contributions to repay these loans, leaving banks and commodity brokers to absorb massive losses. The market price of tin plummeted to half its previous level. The collapse came as an unexpected shock, for the ITA had been widely viewed as the world’s most successful commodity pact. International agreements operating almost continuously during the past 50 years, including the ITA and its precursors, have been credited with successfully reducing fluctuations in the naturally volatile price of tin. The collapse now makes the whole future of tin regulation uncertain. In addition, the failure of tin sounds a warning for other commodity pacts, which are equally susceptible to the underlying weaknesses to which tin fell prey.

Until lately, the procedure of third-party intervention before the International Court of Justice provided for by Articles 62 and 63 of the Statute of the Court had been underutilized; as a result, there was scant judicial authority and comparatively little academic discussion on its use and limitations. This situation has now dramatically changed, as three recent cases before the Court have involved claims of third-party intervention: that between Tunisia and Libya, where Malta made the request to intervene; that between Libya and Malta, where Italy was the requesting state; and, most recently, the case between Nicaragua and the United States, where El Salvador made a declaration of intervention.

In February of 1984, the National Foreign Investment Commission of Mexico surprised the investment community by announcing that it would apply the Foreign Investment Law of 1973 (FIL) with flexibility and would consider permitting foreign capital investment of up to 100 percent in a significant number of activities. Actually, Mexico had been expected to increase its restriction of foreign investment in view of the Government’s efforts to decrease its economic dependence upon other countries.

In recent years, several courts in the United States have denied requests for pre-award attachments on the ground that such remedies were contrary to the parties’ agreement to arbitrate, and thus to the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (New York Convention or Convention). Despite these decisions, pre-award attachment is an available remedy in certain jurisdictions in the United States. Furthermore, pre-award remedies to secure assets located outside the United States can be obtained through the courts in other countries.

The International Law Commission of the United Nations is currently studying a topic entitled “International Liability for Injurious Consequences Arising out of Acts Not Prohibited by International Law” (hereinafter “international liability” or “topic”). That topic has proven to be as serpentine as its title suggests and consequently is difficult to define. It is generally understood as encompassing, in particular, harmful transnational environmental effects of internationally lawful activities. This aspect alone has made the topic increasingly important, as demands on resources have intensified, technological advances have given rise to threats of widespread and even catastrophic transboundary harm, and the international community has grown more interdependent in other ways.

One way of thinking about cultural property—i.e., objects of artistic, archaeological, ethnological or historical interest—is as components of a common human culture, whatever their places of origin or present location, independent of property rights or national jurisdiction. That is the attitude embodied in the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of May 14, 1954 (hereinafter “Hague 1954”), which culminates a development in the international law of war that began in the mid-19th century.

The entire burden of caring for millions of refugees has until now been assumed by the uprooted refugees themselves, their countries of asylum, their countries of resettlement and donors, whether directly or through international organizations. Overlooked are the responsibilities of the countries of origin both toward their own citizens now turned refugees and toward the countries of asylum saddled with the burden of caring for those refugees. This paper focuses on the responsibilities of the source countries under international law to compensate refugees and countries of asylum. It is hoped that clarification and fulfillment of these responsibilities will contribute not only to the well-being of refugees and the alleviation of the burdens on their hosts, but also to the reduction or eradication of the very phenomenon of “refugees.”

In the latest interpretation of the 13-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty)—one that stunned the arms control community—the Reagan administration announced on October 6, 1985, that the United States is authorized under the Treaty to develop and test advanced technology, spacebased weapons systems such as lasers and particle beam weapons. According to the administration, the ABM Treaty places no restrictions, short of actual deployment, on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the so-called Star Wars program. Although Secretary of State George Shultz has stated that the United States will continue to exercise restraint in the SDI program by limiting the development and testing of weapons according to a “restrictive” interpretation of the ABM Treaty, the question remains whether a legally sound basis exists for the administration’s “permissive” interpretation of the Treaty.

In a recent article entitled The Secret War in Central America and the Future of World Order, Professor John Norton Moore, a staunch defender of United States actions toward Nicaragua, sets forth a comprehensive array of factual assertions and legal arguments to support his conclusions that support by the United States of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries or “contras” and its own actions against Nicaragua are justified as collective self-defense under international law. He also presents arguments to support his conclusion that the International Court of Justice has so exceeded its authority in exercising jurisdiction in the case of Nicaragua v. United States that its decisions are void, and consequently may be ignored by the United States—or, for that matter, Nicaragua. Professor Moore’s analysis and conclusions differ sharply from those of the present writer. It should therefore be useful to identify the main points of disagreement, and to suggest the policy implications of the different legal arguments and conclusions.

The core principle of modern world order is that aggressive attack is prohibited in international relations and that necessary and proportional force may be used in response to such an attack. This dual principle is embodied in Articles 2(4) and 51 of the United Nations Charter, Articles 21 and 22 of the revised Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) and virtually every modern normative statement about the use of force in international relations. Indeed, it is the most important principle to emerge in more than two thousand years of human thought about the prevention of war. In the contemporary world of conflicting ideologies and nuclear threat, no task is more important for international lawyers and statesmen than to maintain the integrity of this principle in both its critical—and reciprocal—dimensions: prohibition of aggression and maintenance of the right of effective defense.

Philip Jessup’s life was richly varied. Scholar, practitioner, teacher, administrator, diplomat, judge, prolific writer—he moved from role to role, displaying in each his abundant gifts of character and intellect. Every new job, each fresh subject was a challenge met with zest and high spirits. As a scholar, he was drawn to the issues of the day. He never hesitated to take sides when he felt he had good grounds to do so. In his classes and writings, he was as concerned with practical action as with new ideas. Endowed with a commanding presence, a remarkably resonant voice and a talent for lucid and lively expression, Jessup had no difficulty in getting the attention of an audience. He used concepts sparingly, but effectively, and he avoided windy rhetoric. On the whole, he favored narrative exposition, particularly highlighting the aims and predicaments of the individual actors. People, it seems clear, were more real to him than the abstractions of law or political theory. He was a stickler for thorough and detailed research, as his judicial opinions and books show. Concrete, unique facts were important to him; he had to get them right. Historical detail and revealing quotations were used by him with telling effect.

To write of Philip Jessup means to survey the history of the teaching of international law in the United States throughout the last half century; to cover all important events concerning the birth of international organizations on the morrow of the Second World War; to visit the halls of the General Assembly and the Security Council; to attend meetings of the American Society of International Law and the Institute of International Law, where he so frequently took the floor to shed light on their debates; to attend sittings of the International Court of Justice in the years 1960-1969. I could hardly undertake this task; there are others much more qualified to do so. What I wish to do is to recall him as a great jurist I knew and a delightful human being; in short, a judge and a great friend whom I learned to admire.