International Law Reports 1950

Ophthalmic international standards, 1950.

ONE of the duties incumbent upon an international scientific organization is the establishment of a system of standard measures and methods for general use within its particular science. In ophthalmology, this need was beginning to be felt at the end of the 19th century, and at the X Ophthalmological Congress which was held at Lucerne in 1904 the Societe franQaise d'Ophtalmologie made certain p...

REPORTS AND DOCUMENTS: The Geneva Conventions and Public International Law

With sixty years of hindsight, it seems particularly appropriate to reflect on the trajectory of international humanitarian law (IHL) as shaped by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The near universal acceptance of the Conventions and their secure integration into the international system can sometimes lead us to underestimate the significance of their impact. It is this transformative impact on publ...

On Teaching International Law

InternatIonal Soft law

Although the concept of soft law has existed for years, scholars have not reached consensus on why states use soft law or even whether “soft law” is a coherent analytic category. In part, this confusion reflects a deep diversity in both the types of international agreements and the strategic situations that produce them. In this paper, we advance four complementary explanations for why states u...

International Law, International Relations and Compliance

Commitments are a persistent feature of international affairs. Disagreement over the effect of international commitments and the causes of compliance with them is equally persistent. Yet in the last decade the long-standing divide between those who believed that international rules per se shaped state behavior and those who saw such rules as epiphenomena1 or insignificant has given way to a mor...