The International Monetary System and the Erosion of Sovereignty: Essay in Honor of Cynthia Lichtenstein

When the major international organizations were established at the close of World War II, it was understood that they were concerned with international relations-political, economic, and social. As was made explicit in the U.N. Charter, but applicable in all the organizations, matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state were not the concern of the international organizations or the international community. In particular, the International Monetary Fund was to focus on member states\u27 balance of payments, exchange rates, and exchange controls, but not on their domestic policies or priorities. Gradually, it became clear that the wall between domestic and international policies could not be maintained. As the IMF moved to a regime of conditionality for the use of its resources, and thereafter to performance targets and deadlines, domestic policies of states became subjects of examination in ever increasing detail. Not only national budgets, taxes, and the money supply, but subsidies, wage policies, competition law, corporate governance, even accounting practices and regulatory reform became subject to scrutiny, negotiation and commitment. The Essay does not condemn this erosion of sovereignty, but points out that neither the member states nor the IMF have come up with a new theory to reflect the new reality, or reached agreement on where a new boundary may be set between national and international concerns

Economic Sanctions: A Look Back and a Look Ahead

A Review of International Economic Sanctions by Barry E. Carte

Harold Maier, Comity, and the Foreign Relations Restatement

Hal Maier\u27s career and mine have interacted in several respects. We have both served in the Legal Adviser\u27s Office of the State Department; we have both taught Conflict of Laws as well as International Law; and we have both tried to show--I believe successfully--that there is no sharp divide between Public International Law and Private International Law. In particular, we have both been interested in the reach and limits of economic regulation across international frontiers, initially in connection with antitrust and securities regulation, but also in connection with economic sanctions, pollution controls, and other interactions of governmental and private activity. Generally, Professor Maier and I have come out in the same way on particular issues. We have both advocated reduced emphasis on power and sovereignty and greater emphasis on restraint and flexibility in application of the law of the forum to activity with links to more than one state. Yet there has been a fundamental difference between us which grew as what became the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law was being drafted, debated, and eventually accepted by the American Law Institute

Trade Controls for Political Ends: Four Perspectives

The prevailing view among commentators (if not among policymakers) is that economic sanctions are a bad idea-bad economics, bad politics, bad law. Just a few minutes in the library turns up articles and books such as Economic Sanctions: Obstruction or Instrument for World Trade? (and you can guess the answer); Ineffectiveness of Economic Sanctions: Same Song, Same Refrain?; Feeling Good or Doing Good with Sanctions, Altering U.S. Sanctions Policy and so on. Most of the critique of economic sanctions has been directed at so-called unilateral sanctions, which are sanctions imposed (alone or with the usual allies) by the United States. The fact that the UN Security Council has instituted a plethora of economic sanctions since the automatic Soviet veto melted away in 1991, has taken away one of the arguments against imposition of sanctions, but has generally not converted the opponents of sanctions to supporters of non-forcible measures of international diplomacy

Professor Lowenfeld Responds

Professor Silberman is as usual gracious in acknowledging my writings in various formats, and my efforts to restore conflict of laws to its place as a branch of international law, a place it has occupied in most of the world outside the United States, and occupied here as well in the view of Story and others who wrote before the balkanization of American law in the latter part of the nineteenth century. We have no disagreements on the value of the comparative method in teaching conflict of laws, civil procedure, or international litigation. This brief response is addressed only to what Professor Silberman describes as the ever-puzzling decision in Asahi v. Superior Court. There is nothing puzzling about that decision, and I do not believe Professor Silberman is really puzzled. The Court concluded that it made no sense--i.e., it was unreasonable--to subject a Japanese subcomponent maker to the jurisdiction of a California court on a claim for indemnity or contribution by a Taiwanese component maker, when no U.S. resident party--plaintiff or defendant--had an interest in the outcome of that controversy. What troubles her, it seems, is that the discretionary element in jurisdiction over non-residents, which she approves of in England, has crept into the American approach to jurisdiction through use of the word reasonable. Professor Silberman would like judicial jurisdiction to be like--or at least more like--her view of the Internal Revenue Code; either the court has jurisdiction or it does not. I believe judicial jurisdiction can never be wholly precise, once it moves from a dependence on personal service in a given territory to concepts such as domicile, arising out of, place of performance of the obligation, presence, and transaction of business. More significant, however, is the discontent of Professor Silberman, and like-minded proceduralists such as Professor Burbank, with flexible construction of the Constitution itself

Hijacking, Freedom, and the American Way

A Review of Judgment in Berlin by Herbert J. Ster

Some Comments on Burdell v. Canadian Pacific Airlines

Frank Burdell was the Far Eastern representative of an American heavy-equipment company, stationed in Singapore. At the end of February 1966, Burdell traveled to Tokyo on a Singapore-Bangkok-Hong Kong-Tokyo and return ticket, purchased in Singapore from Cathay Pacific but using Canadian Pacific Airlines for the Hong Kong--Tokyo portion of the journey. Canadian Pacific\u27s flight 402 from Hong Kong to Tokyo on March 4, 1966, arrived over Tokyo in a fog, circled for about an hour, finally came in to land, and crashed into the rear wall at the end of the runway killing its crew of ten and all but ten of its sixty-two passengers, including Burdell. Burdell was 40 years old at the time of his death and was earning about $15,000 per year. He left a wife, Lois, aged 32, and three children, 18, 9, and 7 years old. Shortly after the accident, Mrs. Burdell and her children returned to the United States, and in due course they brought suit against Canadian Pacific Airlines in the Circuit Court, Cook County, Illinois, Judge Nicholas J. Bua presiding. Canadian Pacific had an office in Chicago, and was properly served. Apparently the suit was commenced before the statute of limitations of any possible jurisdiction had run. Apart from these two points, everything else was confusion. This Comment takes up some of the issues raised in along and in some ways surprising opinion of Judge Nicholas J. Bua in the Circuit Court, Cook County, Illinois, November 7, 1968