The origin of the litigation dealt with in this article, traceable to the lack of capacity to pay of German Governments after World War I and World War II, goes back to the period between these two conflicts. The German defeat in 1918 entailed economic consequences giving rise, inter alia, to the controversy adjudicated by the award of 16 May 1980. The Treaty of Versailles required the vanquished empire to assume entire responsibility by means of reparations payments for the losses and damage suffered by the victorious Allied Powers. At the outset, these liabilities were unlimited in amount. In 1921 their sum total was fixed by the London Payments Schedule at 132 milliards of gold marks (132,000 million), without any regard being paid to the problems involved in the raising and transfer of the funds. The combined impact of these measures and crippling post-war domestic inflation soon resulted in huge arrears, suggesting the impossibility of carrying out the agreement, and the conclusion that reparations could not be collected unless the German economy had sufficient strength to cope with that task.

The application, or putting into effect, of any legal act presupposes a logically prior stage: its interpretation. Everyone who applies a legal act is interpreting it, and, in doing so, is, consciously or unconsciously, following a certain method. Viewed as an intellectual exercise, legal interpretation presupposes the existence of an act creating or determining rights and obligations, prescribing action or abstention from action: in short, designed to give rise to legal consequences. Every system of law deriving from formal sources necessarily involves some such process. On the other hand, it is difficult to speak of legal interpretation properly so called in the context of a system of moral precepts such as the law of nature, which remain more or less indefinite and which are arrived at by means of conjecture based on pure reason, and do not entail any immediate juridical consequences. Gény put it this way:

“Proceedings on the assumption of the absolute power of human reason to discover the laws of human nature, both in principle and in detail, the natural law school intended to create, by the mere force of thinking, a complete system of absolute, immutable, directly and universally applicable law that the legislature had only to put into words,…”

Sociologically oriented studies of courts have been well-established in the United States for many decades. The interest of the American Realist School of Jurisprudence in how courts actually do work, as opposed to how they say they work, has ensured a reception for those studies which might help us better understand judicial behaviour. They have been accepted much more slowly in other jurisdictions such as Germany and the United Kingdom and are yet to be accepted in France. Sociological analyses of court processes and judicial behaviour in international tribunals have also been slow to be accepted. As recently as 1975 an eminent international lawyer found a first attempt at such a study on the International Court of Justice “disconcerting”.

Multinational Enterprises (MNEs), in the terminology of the United Nations also called Transnational Corporations (TNCs) have developed organizational structures which are so complex that the primary, if not the only, legal concern in international economic relations is no longer the protection of investments in developing countries, as was the case in the 'sixties, but the protection of those countries themselves, and even of (hightly) developted countries.

French riot police met the Greenpeace Organisation's ship “Sirius” with CS gas, when she tried to enter Cherbourg harbour in January 1983. She was acting in defiance of injunctions and a ban imposed on Greenpeace vessels by the harbour Prefect after an earlier similar protest against the import of spent nuclear fuel in 1980. She and her international crew were detained for several days; her captain was prosecuted and the UK Director of the environmental protest organisation, Mr. Peter Wilkinson, was held in prison overnight by virtue of an injunction – of which he had been unaware – against his personal presence anywhere in France.

The Convention on the Law of the Sea is the result of almost ten years of negotiation at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. Three factors largely explain the length of the negotiations, namely: (1) the conflict of interests between the coastal states and the maritime states, including the military interests of the US and the USSR;(2) the divergent positions on the future regime for sharing resources found on the ocean floor held by the developing countries and the industrialized states, and (3) the problems connected with incorporating the interests of the land-locked countries into a convention on the law of the sea.