With the adoption of a resolution by the Council of the League of Nations, transmitting the report of the Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law to the Assembly, what may be called the preliminary work of that Committee has reached such a stage that it seems possible to review its activities in the process of codification adopted by the League of Nations. It will be remembered that the Hague Commission of Jurists in its report accompanying the Statute of the World Court recommended the creation of agencies for codification, and that Lord Robert Cecil’s opposition to codification delayed acceptance of the Commission’s recommendation until September, 1924, when the Assembly upon the initiative of Sweden provided for the appointment of a committee of experts.

On Monday evening, April 18, 1927, his Excellency Octavio Mangabeira, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, formally opened the International Commission of American Jurists for the Codification of International Law, Public and Private, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the Monroe Palace, in the presence of the official representatives of seventeen of the twenty-one American Republics, having before them, as the bases of their labors,the projects of public and private international law drafted by the American Institute of International Law. On Friday afternoon, May 20, 1927, he formally adjourned the International Commission of American Jurists, which had to its credit twelve projects of public international law, and a code of private international law of no less than 439 articles, which the Commission had, within the short space of five weeks, put into shape primarily from the projects of the American Institute of International Law. It is the purpose of the present article to show how this Commission, the first official body which successfully and consciously endeavored to codify the two branches of international law, accomplished the purpose for which it had been created and assembled.

On August 15, 1921, the Secretary of State of the United States acknowledged receipt from the Secretary General of the League of Nations of a certified copy of the protocol of the Permanent Court of International Justice opened for signature on December 16, 1920, by members of the League and states mentioned in the annex to the Covenant. On February 24, 1923, President Harding submitted the protocol and the accompanying statute to the Senate with a request for its consent to American adhesion with four “ conditions and understandings” explained in an attached letter from Secretary of State Hughes, dated February 17, 1923. President Harding continued to speak for the court until his death, and on December 6, 1923, President Coolidge commended the proposal to the Senate. Resolutions on the subject were introduced in the Senate by Senators Lenroot of Wisconsin (December 10, 1923), Pepper of Pennsylvania (April 7, 1924), Lodge of Massachusetts (May 5, 1924), Swanson of Virginia (May 5, 1924), King of Utah (May 20, 1924), and on May 26, 1924, Senator Pepper submitted a report from the Committee on Foreign Relations endorsing his proposal for Senate consent with radical amendments to the statute.

The inauguration of the mixed court of tangier on june 1, 1925, marked the beginning of a new experiment in international cooperation for the administration of justice. While it is perhaps too early for any definite conclusions to be drawn as to the success and significance of this experiment, enough time may have elapsed for some useful study to be made of it and possibly for some forecast of its future.

In the course of its fifth year, the Permanent Court of International Justice has builded a record of constructive work which may perhaps excite less interest than the records of previous years but which constitutes a substantial addition to the new foundations of international jurisprudence which the court is laying. The judges were at The Hague for two sessions: the tenth (extraordinary) session from February 2, 1926, to May 25, 1926, and the eleventh (ordinary) session from June 15, 1926, to July 31, 1926. It is notable that all of the eleven judges were present at the latter session, for the first time in the history of the court. At the extraordinary session early in the year, the court handed down its seventh judgment, and at the ordinary session during the summer, its thirteenth advisory opinion. In addition, the court undertook the very important task of revising its rules of procedure, and the experience of the past four years has been embodied in the new Rules of Court which became effective as from July 31, 1926. Outside the chambers of the court itself, some questions have arisen which may affect its future; so that on the whole, it has been a significant year in the court's history.

One of the most controversial rules of private international law is the exception of public order, the rule not to enforce foreign laws which are contrary to the fundamental conceptions of the law of the state having jurisdiction. There is no country in which this exception has not played an important rôle in the refusal to enforce foreign laws, and numerous writers have discussed the importance and difficulties of the exception of public order. Its problems had been thoroughly studied before the World War by many authorities on private international law, among others by Bustamante, Fiore, Kahn, Klein and Pillet, without a uniform solution having been reached. When, after the war, the states began to reestablish their international relations, the exception of public order began anew to play its rôle in the courts the world over, and to put the same difficulties before the judges dealing with cases of conflict between domestic and foreign laws.

The wave of exaggerated nationalism which has pervaded the nations of the earth generally since the World War has been accompanied by seemingly serious efforts on the part of national governments to arrange for the production within their territorial limits of as many as possible of the articles which their peoples consume, often quite heedless of the cost of home as compared with external production. Such disregard of economic laws could scarcely have failed to aggravate the poverty in which the world was inevitably left in the wake of the war. Political leaders have seemed wholly unmindful of the essential truth of economics, namely, that destruction and waste, the accompaniments of war, cannot be indulged in without a lowering of economic standards, that those standards can only be raised by production, and that recovery is accomplished in the measure that production is achieved at the place and by the methods which make possible the largest output of consumable goods in proportion to the labor and raw material involved.

The United States of America, having refused to ratify the peace treaty negotiated at Paris in 1919 between the Allied and Associated Powers, on the one hand, and Germany on the other hand, commonly called the Treaty of Versailles, has, nevertheless, reserved to itself all the rights arising from the said treaty in the separate treaty of peace which was concluded between the United States of America and Germany on August 25, 1921, and ratified at Berlin on November 11, 1921, the treaty having been promulgated by the President of the United States on November 14, 1921. The clause containing the said reservation of rights reads that