As military commissions have been revived in the wake of the attacks of September 11,2001, interest has grown in the history of the institution. The United States Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, sketched out some historical notes and set forth a tripartite division between law-of-war commissions, martial law commissions, and occupation tribunals. Various authors have advanced insights on this history, though most have focused on the prominent episodes, particularly the handful of Supreme Court cases. Even the most comprehensive article gives short shrift to the massive employment of commissions in the Reconstruction era and in postwar Germany. This essay attempts to advance the cause by sketching out the entire scope of the institution’s history and indicating what further research would have to be done to arrive at a truly comprehensive treatment. A basic difficulty is that the work product of military commissions is not encompassed in a series of trial reports like the Federal Supplement or the military’s own Court-Martial Reports. A handful of cases wound up in the Supreme Court and another half dozen stood out enough to attract historians’ interest. Otherwise, commission proceedings are memorialized, if at all, only in military general orders and records of trials that were maintained in the Office of the Judge Advocate General. I have explored the records pertaining to commissions in the Reconstruction period following the Civil War in anticipation of writing a comprehensive article. It is a difficult and time-consuming task. To complete the picture, similar pick-and-shovel work would have to be done on such extensive use of the commission as occurred in Germany after World War II. Both the Civil War-Reconstruction period and the German occupation produced thousands of trials.

To discuss the history of international economic law since the American Journal of International Law was first published in 1907 requires the author to project categories common to the parlance of 2006 back to times when theywere unknown. So far as it appears, the term did not become current until after World War II. Its scope is controversial. According to one definition, it encompasses “the total range of norms (directly or indirectly based on treaties) of public international law with regard to transnational economic relations.” A wide variety of international law rules have been said to have a financial impact somewhere. For practical purposes, in this essay I define international economic law as the international law regulating transborder transactions in goods, services, currency, investment, and intellectual property. I exclude from the inquiry issues of private international law, as well as of economic warfare.

The proposed draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights addressed to transnational corporations are making their way through the human rights channels in the United Nations. A previous effort in the United Nations failed twenty years ago. The Norms would urge those firms to adhere to a long list of treaties on the environment, labour standards, human rights, and the like. They would enter into a field already occupied by numerous principles and guidelines generated by many different institutions with varying degrees of authority. The addition of these norms to that corpus seems of marginal utility.