International law is both a contemplative academic subject and an active ingredient of diplomatic process in world affairs. The failure to maintain the clarity of this distinction accounts for considerable confusion about the nature and function of international law in the world today. An international lawyer is also a citizen of a nation-state who often holds strong views as to preferred courses of foreign policy. One way for him to vindicate these views is to demonstrate their compatibility or incompatibility with governing rules of international law. Confusion arises in scholarly settings whenever the adversary presentation of views is not distinguished from the scholarly assessment of opposing lines of adversary presentation.

The 1946 Bermuda Agreement is the major model for the United States bilateral air transport agreements. The Chicago Convention of 1944 had failed to provide traffic rights for scheduled air carriers because the United States and the United Kingdom disagreed over economic regulation of international air transport. The agreement which these competitors made two years later at Bermuda rivaled the Chicago Convention in importance because its compromise formula became the key to the later bilateral air transport agreements upon which is based the existence of all international scheduled air transport.

Until recently, the view that new states start life unencumbered by the treaties which applied to their territories before independence has been almost universally and, too often, one might add, uncritically accepted. An exception, often explained away as only apparent, was made for “localized” treaties. And in the past fifteen or twenty years, the case for the continued force of multilateral “lawmaking” treaties has been pressed; this would be a real exception to the general clean-slate rule. Unless a bilateral treaty could be characterized as “localized,” however, the new state, according to the prevailing opinion, was freed of any continuing obligation by the act of becoming independent.

There seems to be a tendency to disregard the sovereignty of the little Principality of Liechtenstein. In a chart published by one of America’s leading news magazines on the United Nations, there is this strange reference: “Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino are not eligible (for membership in the United Nations) being principalities rather than sovereign (sic) states.” A book on the government of Switzerland devotes the last three paragraphs to Liechtenstein and then concludes that it looked as though Liechtenstein had “actually become a Swiss canton in all respects except, perhaps, for the right of the principality to issue its own postage stamps.”

One of the best-known antitrust decisions in the last quarter of a century is United States v. Aluminum Company of America et al., now usually referred to as the ALCOA case. Although the Sherman Act had for some time been given an extraterritorial application when American corporations were involved, the novelty of ALCOA was that the decision, written by that eminent jurist, Judge Learned Hand, for the first time interpreted our antitrust laws as rendering illegal contracts of a foreign corporation which were made abroad with other foreign corporations and which related to business carried on and to acts to be performed abroad. No American party was involved, and no act took place in the United States, in the part of the case that is here to be considered. Jurisdiction was claimed merely on the basis of an adverse “effect” on our foreign and domestic commerce.