The United States at the dawn of the twentieth century was just beginning to comprehend the influence it could have on the international scene. It had no desire to become involved in the European power politics that had produced, in the lifetimes of many Americans then living, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War and the essentially European Boer War in South Africa. Nevertheless, a distinct strain of expansionism could be found in American foreign policy. The belief was stirring in those concerned to establish a nonviolent world order that the interaction of nation-states would benefit from exposure to American values, American economic dynamism and the lessons to be drawn from the American federal experience. This belief, combined with a deep aversion to what was seen as essentially a European proclivity for settling disputes by resort to war, motivated some of the more influential participants in the American peace movement. That movement, in turn, gave birth to the American Society of International Law.

In Bosnia, the vaunted ideal—a multivariegated state of Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats living in a tolerant civil society—has virtually been extinguished by a torrent of blood and tears. In Belgium, itself a less than two-hundred-year-old product of Catholic rebellion against Orange-Protestant Holland, the Flemish Catholics of Flanders have all but parted ways with the French Catholics of Walloonia, leaving an ethnically stressed Brussels paradoxically ensconced as capital of a “United Europe.” What is going on here, or in Somalia, Slovakia, Quebec and Kazakhstan?

Increasing international economic interdependence is obviously becoming a growing challenge to governments, which are frustrated by their limited capacities to regulate or control cross-border economic activities. Many subjects trigger this frustration, including interest rates, various fraudulent or criminal activities, product standards, consumer protection, environmental issues and prudential concerns for financial services. Although it has been said that “all politics is local,” it has also been said, with considerable justification, that “all economics is international.”

Should the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “judicially review” Security Council decisions? The question, once fanciful, is now being asked seriously by litigants in and judges on the World Court, nonpermanent members of the Security Council that consider it an “undemocratic” body acting as “a cloak for a new form of imperialism,” and scholars worried about its recent “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” acts. The recent throng of commentators and advocates includes students of realpolitik warning the Court against any unrealistic attempt to transform the United Nations collective security scheme into a constitutional structure of checks and balances, and legalists grasping hopefully for hints of Marbury v. Madison in recent World Court pronouncements.

The popularity of arbitration as a mechanism for settling disputes between transnational contracting parties has led to standardization in many areas of arbitration law and procedure. One important aspect of the arbitral process, however, the practice of awarding compensatory interest, has been left behind in the march toward uniformity. To date, arbitral tribunals have failed to adopt a rational and uniform approach for evaluating interest claims. Consequently, resolving interest claims is often an expensive and time-consuming process, fraught with uncertainty, which typically results in inconsistent arbitral awards. This result is particularly problematic in the international arbitral arena: such claims often involve millions of dollars, and because a lengthy period may elapse between the origin of the dispute and the final award, whether an arbitrator awards interest may be as significant, from a monetary standpoint, as the principal claim itself.

There is enough freshwater in the world to meet the existing and future needs of the world’s population. Water, however, is poorly distributed: there are regions that suffer severe drought, while others are heavily flooded; regions that have ample water in winter, but not enough in summer; and regions that abound in water during certain years, but are threatened by droughts in others. Thus, the management of freshwater is largely a question of redistribution of a natural resource, given certain physical, economic, environmental and social constraints. Such management inevitably brings into play the competing priorities of different uses and users; and, since most water resources traverse political boundaries, these competing priorities often become regional conflicts between riparian states.

What is the governing law for loan agreements entered into by the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) in carrying out their public sector lending? That question was first definitively addressed about thirty-five years ago. This article examines the question anew, against the backdrop of recent developments in practice, especially at the newest of the MDBs, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

It is now conventional wisdom that the proliferation of ethnic-based violence constitutes the greatest threat to public order and human rights since the lifting of the Iron Curtain. The eruption of hatreds, whether suppressed or ignored for a half century or newly arisen, has unleashed centrifugal forces that are pulling states apart from Africa to Europe to South and Central Asia. To date, the response of the effective decision makers in the international community has been ambiguous and inconstant: the United Nations member states reiterate the importance of the unity of all states, but they accept accomplished breakups after the fact, all the while insisting on the protection of minorities within states. Political philosophers struggle with the circumstances under which secession and dissolution are desirable; international law declares the lack of either a blanket right to, or prohibition against, secession and seemingly relegates its achievement to a pure power calculus.

Rules of origin are the criteria used to determine the nationality of a product. They are essential to implementing discriminatory trade policies, compiling economic statistics on trade flows, and marking a product with its country of origin. Rules of origin were easy-to-apply, uncontroversial tools of international trade as long as the parts of a product were manufactured and assembled primarily in one country and other effective protectionist mechanisms could be used.

On March 12, 1996, President Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996, generally known by the names of its principal sponsors as the Helms-Burton Act. The Act is a mixture of codification of existing economic sanctions previously imposed pursuant to executive orders; inducements and promises related to restoration of democracy in Cuba; threats against persons from third countries that do business with Cuba; a new, unprecedented remedy for expropriation; and restrictions on entry into the United States by persons who “traffic in confiscated property” or who are affiliated with such persons by ownership, employment or family. The President had indicated that he would veto the Helms-Burton bill if it reached his desk, and quite possibly it would never have done so, but for the events in the Florida Strait on Saturday, February 24, 1996. On that day, at about 3:15 in the afternoon, two Cessna 337 light planes flown by a Cuban-American organization based in Florida were blown up by missiles launched by MIG–23 and MIG–29 planes of the Cuban Air Force, apparently on standing orders of President Fidel Castro. President Clinton immediately condemned the attack, and by the following Wednesday, he announced that he now would sign the Helms-Burton bill, subject to one compromise to be discussed hereafter.

The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996, otherwise known as the Helms-Burton Act, became law on March 12, 1996. Title III of the legislation creates a federal cause of action, on behalf of U.S. citizens whose property was confiscated without compensation by Cuba, against those who “traffic” in that property. Several governments—notably Canada, Mexico and those of the European Union, whose corporate citizens are the principal “traffickers”—have denounced the legislation as an exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction that violates customary international law. These governments apparently see nothing wrong with permitting—even encouraging—their nationals to use and profit from property that rightfully belongs to others. The United States not only commands the moral high ground on this issue; it also has the better of the legal argument.