The Rights of Man in the World Community: Constitutional Illusions Versus Rational Action

It is only from a perspective of centuries that the United Nations program for human rights can be accurately observed or rationally appraised. This program, too often thought to be at the periphery of the purposes of the United Nations, represents in fact the main core of rational objectives not only of the United Nations but of all democratic government. It represents the converging and integration on a global scale of many movements, movements hitherto restricted in areal diffusion but centuries-old and rooted deep in universal human nature and civilized culture. It is heir to all the great historic democratic movements—for constitutionalism, freedom, equality, fraternity, humanitarianism, liberalism, enlightenment, peace, opportunity, and so on It is the contemporary culmination of man\u27s long struggle for all his basic human values: for participation in the processes by which he is governed, equality before the law, and that wide sharing of power, both formal and real, which we call democracy; for sanctity of person, for freedom from arbitrary restraints and cruel and inhuman punishments, and for positive opportunity to develop latent talents for the enrichment and well-being of personality; for the enlightenment by which rational decisions can be made and for freedom of inquiry and opinion; for that fundamental respect for human dignity which both precludes discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion, political opinion, or other ground irrelevant to capacity and provides positive recognition of common merit as a human being and special merit as an individual; for access to resources to produce the goods and services necessary to maintain rising standards of living and comfort; for acquisition of the skills necessary to express talent and to achieve individual and community values to the fullest; for freedom to explain life, the universe, and values, to fix standards of rectitude, and to worship God or gods as may seem best; for affection, fraternity, and congenial personal relationships in groups freely chosen; for, in sum, a security which includes not only freedom from violence and threats of violence but also full opportunity to preserve and increase all values by peaceful, noncoercive procedures

The Law School of the Future: From Legal Realism to Policy Science in the World Community

The following address was delivered before the Yale Law School Association on June 17, 1947. In the first section, entitled From Legal Realism to Policy Science, Professor McDougal summarizes a proposed reorientation of legal education. In the second section, Objectives at Yale, Professor McDougal indicates the present impact of this proposed reorientation on the Yale Law School curriculum. The Editors of the Journal wish to thank the Yale Law School Association for the opportunity of presenting to a wider audience Professor McDougal\u27s views on the function of the law school

The Hydrogen Bomb Tests and the International Law of the Sea

From high quarters has come the suggestion that the hydrogen bomb tests conducted by the United States off the Pacific islands, held by it under strategic Trusteeship Agreement with the United Nations, contravene the customary public international law of the sea. Thus Earl Jowitt remarked in the House of Lords: I am entirely satisfied that the United States, in conducting these experiments, have taken every possible step open to them to avoid any possible danger. But the fact that the area which may be affected is so enormous at once brings this problem: that ships on their lawful occasions may be going through these waters, and you have no right under international law, I presume, to warn people off

Jurisprudence for a Free Society

Georgia Law Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 1966), pp. 1-19 The search for a jurisprudence, a theory about law, appropriate for a free society, has long been a subject of concern to legal scholars. In attempting to make some modest contribution to this search, the major themes and arguments McDougal explores are: first, the intimate interrelations of law and public order in any community; second, the intellectual functions required of a useful jurisprudence or theory about law; third, the most important contributions of past schools of jurisprudence to a useful theory about law; fourth, the basic pattern of a policy-oriented approach to inquiry about law; fifth, and finally, some of the conditions for promoting a public order of freedom and human dignity. It will be obvious that to touch even briefly upon so many vast topics, one must perforce be somewhat abstract. It may be recalled that Professor Thomas Reed Powell, a famous professor of constitutional law at Harvard, once said that a man has a good legal mind if he can think about something to which something is attached without thinking about the thing which is attached. If, therefore, we are to employ good legal minds, we must remember that all levels of abstraction, when the terms admit of empirical specification, are necessary to comprehensive and effective communication. This article is an adaptation by the Georgia Law Review of the first John A. Sibley lecture given by Professor McDougal on November 30, 1964

Title Registration and Land Law Reform: A Reply

Writing under the somewhat question-begging title of The Resurrection of Title Registration in the April, 1940, issue of this Review, Professor Percy Bordwell, dean of American property law teachers, seeks to condemn, albeit in a half-hearted and ambiguous way, that method of keeping the public books about land which has popularly come to be known as the Torrens System. Largely an answer to certain uncompromising criticisms of Professor Richard B. Powell\u27s earlier condemnation of that system in his Registration of the Title to Land in the State of New York, Professor Bordwell\u27s article is so temperate in tone and so speciously reasonable, with its generous concessions, that a reader unfamiliar with the problem may miss its paradoxical quality and the utter inconclusiveness of its argument. The burden of Professor Bordwell\u27s complaint is several-fold. The advocates of title registration, he asserts, have largely assumed its manifest superiority over prevalent systems of recording. To explain away the outstanding fact of the ineffectiveness, the failure, of voluntary registration in this country and England they have harped upon the self-interest of solicitors and abstracters and title insurance companies and have adopted a Satanic interpretation of history which does not get us anywhere. Experience in the Anglo-American countries demonstrates that registration must be made compulsory to amount to anything. But why make it compulsory? Why all this fuss about title registration? There has been no such conspicuous failure of the recording system or of title insurance as to discredit either. Title registration cannot make land liquid and as easily transferable as a ship or a share of stock or an automobile ; such extravagant hopes are but a reflection of the fight for free trade in land in England. No millennium will be wrought by a register of title. Registration, being unsuitable for multiple interests, might, however—strange as it may seem—imperil our historic law of estates and future interests; the scrapping of such interests was a by-product (also the most outstanding feat ) of the struggle for registration in England. The important thing to bear in mind is that the logic of registration of title is a revolution in our land law. Finally, we have one system of public transfers already; why supplant it with another which may raise constitutional and personnel difficulties and produce a lack of coherence and uniformity in the common law throughout the country ? The Torrens System is a foreign system. Regardless of the conclusiveness of the certificate, of the desirability of cutting off stale claims and of the modem tendency to look to the state, the case for it is not made out

Third-Party Decision

Mr. President, distinguished delegates, and fellow observers: It is a great honor and pleasure to be permitted to be an observer at this tenth session of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee. Mr. Oscar Schachter, the President of the American Society of International Law, has asked me to express his deep appreciation of your courtesy in allowing us to be present here, and I should like to add my own warm thanks. For more than two years the American Society of International Law has had a special committee, of which I have been a member, studying this draft convention upon the law of treaties and making recommendations to the United States Delegation to the Vienna Conference. It was my privilege also to be a member of the United States Delegation to the first Vienna Conference. Insofar as possible, however, on this occasion I should like to follow the advice given yesterday by Dr. Nagendra Singh and to try to divest myself of all special identities. I hope, with appropriate humility and with awareness of my position as an observer, simply to speak to you as one human being to another and as a citizen of the larger community of mankind