On June 22 of this year important amendments to the Netherlands Constitution concerning the administration of foreign affairs came into force. As those amendments will not only be of interest to students of Netherlands constitutional law but also to those who are interested in the problem of the relationship between international and municipal law and modern tendencies in national constitutions in this respect, it might be useful to give a brief survey of these amendments and their background.

This title appears to be self-contradictory. How can there be a law of war if war is outlawed? This apparent contradiction disappears, howover, if the distinction between “ war in the legal sense” and “ war in the material sense” is kept in mind. War in the legal sense has been in large measure “outlawed” ; that is, the international law conventionally accepted by most states no longer recognizes that large-scale hostilities may constitute a “state of war” in which the belligerents are legally equal. Such hostilities may, however, occur constituting war in the material sense, and “laws of war” may regulate such activities. This has, in fact, long been the situation within the state. All states “outlaw” domestic insurrection, rebellion and civil strife, yet if these events occur, they apply the laws of war to the hostilities involved in their efforts at suppression. The first modern codification of the law of war was, in fact, issued by the United States to apply to civil strife. Lieber's Code, however, distinguished the applicability of the rules of land warfare in international war and in civil war:

Perhaps the easiest way to miss the legal significance of the Schuman Plan and the Treaty to which it gave rise is to study it in terms of familiar legal concepts. Like most really historical documents, the Treaty Constituting the European Coal and Steel Community,though conditioned by the legal concepts with which its drafters were familiar, makes history primarily because it takes a step beyond those traditional concepts.

Despite a widespread hope that in the United Nations mankind had created an organization which would eliminate warfare, events have unfortunately proved that international conflict, with all its attendant legal problems, is not yet a dead issue. Although the United Nations has not extirpated armed conflict, it has, by its very existence and by its actual and potential role as a participant in, and even as an originator of, military actions, altered, of necessity, the status both of Members and nonMembers in the course of such an action. This is a study of that status, together with a consideration of the necessary concomitant changes in the concept of neutrality in the modern world. The laws of neutrality will first be briefly considered; the effect of the League of Nations period will then be examined as background for a comparison with the current period; and the effect and influence of the United Nations will then be studied in greater detail.

Every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. Consequently, no aircraft is normally entitled to enter the airspace above the territory of a foreign state without the latter’s permission Does this principle—very firmly established in international law since World War I—mean that any aircraft entering without such permission 1 is completely at the mercy of the territorial sovereign ? Or does international law impose some restraints upon the latter in this matter?

The International Court of Justice had a relatively busy year in 1952. The judges were in continuous session at The Hague from May 5 to August 27,1952; judgments were given in the Anibatielos Case between Greece and the United Kingdom (on a preliminary objection), in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case between the United Kingdom and Iran (on a preliminary objection), and in the Case Concerning Bights of Nationals of the United States of America in Morocco between France and the United States. At the end of the year three cases were pending: the Amhatielos Case, the Minquiers and Ecrehos Case between the United Kingdom and France, and the Notteiohm Case between Liechtenstein and Guatemala.

Some years ago the author took occasion to review the role of international arbitration in the postwar world, concluding with the suggestion that the work of refining its technique and usefulness should continue to be pressed.Specific tasks to which such work might be directed were earlier suggested in the author's study, The Process of International Arbitration, including the task of preparation of “draft arbitration conventions and procedural rules which, with such further refinements in each individual arbitration as may be required, could serve as a basis for future arbitration proceedings.” It was further pointed out that: “The voluminous body of decisions of international tribunals must be brought together in an ordered system which will enable them to be later readily found by tribunals and advocates.”

To many international lawyers and army officers the terms “law of war” and “military necessity” are mutually incompatible. Many army officers consider the law of war as no more than a collection of pious platitudes, valueless, so they think, because it has no force and effect. Some international lawyers regard military necessity as the bête noire of international jurisprudence, destroying all legal restriction and allowinguncontrolled brute force to rage rampant over the battlefield or wherever the military have control.

It is generally agreed that the modern origins of the law of nations are to be found in two great early seventeenth-century works, Suarez’ Tractatus de legibus ac deo legislatore (1612) and Grotius' De jure belli et pacis (1625). Among their contemporaries, Suarez and Grotius were moderate and mediating men, and they were therefore particularly aware that the basic problems of international diplomacy—the just causes and conduct of war, treatment of prisoners, acquisition of sovereignty and booty through conquest, neutrality or intervention, maritime law, treaties, etc., had become profoundly complicated by the growth of a conscious and extreme political nationalism.

A well-known English judge declared three decades ago that “an alien ami is never exlex . . . whatever rights he has he can enforce by law just as an ordinary subject can.” Nor was this a new thought at that time. More than a hundred years earlier a prominent American judge had affirmed that: