The year 1930 has been marked by the eighteenth (ordinary) session of the Permanent Court of International Justice, which began on June 16,1930, and continued until August 26, 1930, and by the nineteenth (extraordinary) session, which began on October 22, 1930, and ended on December 6, 1930; by the rendering of Advisory Opinion No. 17, on the question of the Greco-Bulgarian “ Communities” ; by the rendering of Advisory Opinion No. 18, on the question relating to the Free City of Danzig and the International Labor Organization; and by the rendering of an important order in the Franco-Swiss Zones case. During this year, also, Judge Frank B. Kellogg was elected to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Charles Evans Hughes, i.e., to serve from September 17, 1930, to December 31, 1930; and nineteen members of the Court were elected for the new term of nine years, beginning on January 1, 1931. The Protocol for the Revision of the Statute of the Court failed to come into force, as anticipated, on September 1, 1930, and the court continues, at any rate for the time being, under the unamended statute.

The above is the title of an article by. Mr. E. G. Trimble in the January (1930) issue of this Journal, which contains a rather severe indictment of the Allied Powers, and particularly of Great Britain, for having violated during the World War various well-settled rules of international law regarding the conduct of maritime warfare. I do not deny at all that there were violations of certain rules and practices which had come to be generally, if not universally, recognized as a part of the customary law of nations—violations not only by the Allied Powers, but on an even larger scale by their opponents, which latter, however, the author passes over in silence. But, in my opinion, his charges in some cases are not well founded either upon principles of international law, reason or the logic of the actual conditions under which the rules had to be applied. In presenting here a different view of the case, my object is not so much to defend the Allied Powers against the charges contained in Mr. Trimble's indictment as to reaffirm and maintain views which I expressed during the war regarding certain rights of belligerents in naval warfare, especially under the peculiar conditions which prevailed during that war—rights the exercise of which I believe was justified in principle by those conditions, whatever may have been the opinion of statesmen and prize judges a century ago, and which would have been claimed and exercised by Germany had the geographical situation as between her and Great Britain been reversed.

Under what circumstances is a state entitled to claim immunity from suit in the courts of another state? It is an old problem which assumes new importance in the face of the steadily enlarging scope of governmental commercial enterprise. Considerable difference of opinion has manifested itself. In England and the United States, where the principle of the immunity of the sovereign before the courts of its own state has long been firmly entrenched, there has been a decided reluctance to open the door to suits against foreign states, however commercial in character the controversy may be. On the Continent a more liberal tendency has long been making itself felt. On general principles, the subject would seem to be one to invite regulation by international agreement.

Since the close of the World War, there has been a continuous and often acrimonious discussion of the issues involved in the war debts of the Allied Powers to the Government of the United States. In estimating the mutual obligations of debtor and creditor governments, the issues involved in the “ repudiated debts” of the Southern States have been revived anew. In the British Parliament the matter has flared up again. On April 1,1925, Austen Chamberlain stated that His Majesty's Government had never made representations on the subject to Washington. “ I hope,” he said, “ that my noble friend (Lady Astor) will apply her persuasive eloquence to the legislatures and governments of those states.” On March 15, 1923, Stanley Baldwin, and on April 14, 1924, Ramsay MacDonald, had answered questions to the same effect. During the London Naval Conference of 1930, a debate on these debts took place in the House of Lords. On both sides of the ocean it has been suggested that the amount of the unpaid bonds be deducted from the amounts due to our government from those European Powers whose nationals now hold these state bonds.

To the ever-increasing confusion of doctrine which makes up the law of sovereign immunity, the courts of the United States have added procedural complications which, though not as weighty, are nevertheless as puzzling as any of the substantive rules. Of recent years the United States Supreme Court and the lower Federal courts have often had occasion to consider the method whereby the question of immunity was raised. The result has been the evolution of a set of rules so vaguely defined in the decisions as to offer little guidance to the bench and bar, and withal of interest to the scholar who finds that these rules exist in no other judicial system.