BOOK REVIEWS
“THE RULE OF LAW ON THE INTERNATIONAL PLANE”
by John E. Read
THE W. M. MARTIN LECrURES, 1960; CLARKE IRWIN & COMPANY LIMITED;
1961; Pp. vii, 56, $3.00.
The most experienced international lawyer in Canada has given us his view
from the mountain-top. John Read, a one-time Dalhousie Law School dean
and Legal Adviser to the Department of External Affairs, and then, for eleven
years, a member of the International Court of Justice, stands far above most
other Canadians in the field in the richness of his background. Add to that
richness a sly, puckish humour, as much Yankee as Maritime, a willingness to
call a spade by its right and dirty name, a healthy realism that stems from
his days as a senior civil servant and a not so ivory tower judge, and there is
here a complex of qualities, brilliant and prismatic in the lights they are able
to throw on the search for the rule of law on the international plane.
Given as the W. M. Martin Lectures at the University of Saskatchewan in
1960, this is a slender volume only in its pages. What Judge Read is searching
for is some pattern of explanation about law in the international order, viewed
first through the historical perspectives of a don, second through the negotiating
and advisory eyes of the foreign office lawyer and third, through the creative,
reflective vision of the international judge. All three talents and attitudes
break through the prose and give variety and depth to his lucid statement of
the main obstacles to the achievement of supremacy for law in the international
order.
It is Judge Read’s principal view that the story of international law had its
happier beginnings in the “conformity” (his word) created out of the “rubble
of Christendom” which marked the end of the wars of religion and the rise
of modern nation states in the 16th and 17th centuries. When Grotius tried to
find some minimum rules of the game by which the new sovereigns would
live together in some kind of early-modem “co-existence” he could behave
like the father of international law only because there was a ready mother in
the Christian conscience. The whole of western Europe was fief to its history
and in that history the Judaic-Christian values, Greek ideals and Roman law
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 8
and organization, all merged into a great stream whose waters and sediment
created modern Europe and our world.
International law, therefore, declares Judge Read, had this initial western-
Christian conformity as the underlying social framework and that conformity
continued down to the emergence in our own day of states and peoples taking
their place on the high road of history but now without all of these links to
our values and our past. Or, if they have these links, they were links achieved
and forged often like shackles in the expansion of empires and the creation
of colonies and some of these shackles hurt and have led to rejection of some
of the very values they were supposed to have brought with them to the
peoples of Asia and Africa. So the era of western-Christian society, and its
international law which was presumed to be universal, is now replaced and
challenged by a time of many cultures where “law” is in fact “universal” but
not conforming. This paradox of extension to new sovereign states of the role
of law, but diminution of a-common rule of law, because the substructure of
a common social order does not yet exist, dominates Judge Read’s thought and
concern.
For him the most significant agency for the extension of the rule of law is
the International Court of Justice. But he sees any movement toward the “new
Jerusalem” dependent, as the medieval common law from Bracton onwards
was dependent, on institutions, acceptance and social co-ordination. The
International Court of Justice is, he believes, not too far removed in its function
and form, from the common law courts of the mid-thirteenth century Britain
searching for a centralized order. In a world that has begun the slow process
of taming power, and constitutionalizing the relations of the sovereign subjects
of international order, particularly through the organic effects of the U.N.
Charter on all states, the Court offers one instrument to encourage the role
and rule of law and to accellerate that constitutionalizing process.
Judge Read proposes two reforms to the present Court and its procedures.
He would modify Article 34 (1) of the Statutes which provides that “only
states may be parties in cases before the Court” by permitting the United
Nations and the Specialized Agencies under certain conditions to be such
parties. No doubt he would include other international organizations under
some appropriate formula. Second, Judge Read would establish special or re-
gional chambers of the Court “with flexible rules, designed to sit any place in
the’ world, and to deal with disputes with the consent of the parties.” There
(1) small tribunals have mobility and would
would be two advantages here-
the
be able to do on-site investigations which are not now possible and (2)
business of the Court could be speeded up with the full Court acting as a final
appellate tribunal for its chambers. He would also increase the term of the
judges to twelve years with no right to be re-elected, thus giving a long term
of independence to the judge and thereby strengthening the dignity and in-
dependence of this judicial office.
No. 4]
BOOK REVIEWS
319
ButJudge Read is a realist. He is only too well aware of how far the divisions
between East and West make impossible the settling of great issues by the
judicial process. The bi-polarization of power has changed the nature of the
game and the rule of law in the day of the atom and the rocket almost gives
rise to a de minimis curat lex. Even so, the international lawyer will not be too
impatient. The setbacks since 1914 are partly compensated for by the new era
of inter-state constitutional advances made possible and even necessary by the
stalemate of terror. Judge Read offers no grand panaceas but he is more sanguine
than often are frightened amateurs about the capacity of East and West to
negotiate and to find common ground. And if a former negotiator and a judge
who had to live with the East around the bargaining tables as well as in the
Judges’ Library at the Hague should feel this much hope, then who are we to
settle for less.
MAXWELL COHEN
”INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION,
CONSTITUTIONAL DOCUMENTS”
by Amos J. Feaslee
Two VOLUMES, REVISED SECOND EDITION, 1961, MARTINUS NIjHOFF,
Pp. LvIII, 1962, 82.50 GUILDERS.
Collectors of documents, accurate and annotated, have a special claim on
the affections of scholars, practitioners and librarians. Who has not struggled
in the days before Amos Peaslee produced his first edition in 1955, of multi-
national organization charters-running from
the International Chestnut
Commission to the United Nations where so many chestnuts are tossed in the
the statute or the
name of peace-to find the treaty or the memorandum,
protocol, creating or amending one of the scores of legal webs now threading
the affairs of mankind. The best of foreign offices may have the best of indexes
and, perhaps, a few great libraries, sophisticated in the ways of international
documentation, could e:tract on short notice a vagrant constitution. But these
are luxuries available only to great powers or great schools. For the rest of us
the average of resources requires more than average effort to find the document
in issue.
Peaslee, having placed us all in his debt in 1955, now is an even greater
creditor with this 1961 edition which includes amendments or new documents
for 38 of the organizations listed in the first edition as well as the notes and
full charters of 35 entirely new organizations not previously included. More-
over, as he points out in his foreword, “Some organizations for which the
first edition had only a note, are now included with the texts of their basic
. . . “Organizations for which there is an
documents and a fuller summary.”
entry in the first edition but not irn the present one, have either a note or a
cross reference to the principal organization.”
The richness of this feast at the table of international institutions can be
tasted by scanning the contents of both volumes, listing 122 organizations. In
the case of the principal inter-governmental organizations, their basic instru-
ments arise in a variety of ways: 36 from “Conventions”, 23 from “Statutes”,
23 from “Agreements”, 13 from “Treaties”, 11 from “Constitutions”, 3
each from “Resolutions”, “Charters” and “Terms of Reference”, 2 each from
“Regulations”, “Pacts” and “Protocols”, I from an “Arrangement”
and
I from a “Scheme”.
In the first edition Mr. Peaslee had an interesting and valuable general
summary of the entire structure and contents of the volumes dealing with the
No. 4]
BOOK REVIEWS
form of the constitutional instruments; ages of the organizations and the
documents; a summary of functions; a summary of the organs of the various
institutions; a listing of the number of members by organizations; a summary
of the financial support; their relations with other international organizations;
and the place of the headquarters of all the institutions dealt with.
In the second edition this valuable summary is now repeated and augmented
in the form of a series of tables dealing with much the same materials but in a
more complete and useful manner. For example, Table I classifies the organiza-
tions for all main types of constitutional documents. Table II gives the ages,
membership, financial support and headquarters. Table III is an ingenious
summary of functions divided into political; legal; economic, food-agriculture;
social; educational, scientific, cultural, transport and communications. Table
IV breaks down the entire list according to their main organs -“plenary”,
. ‘executive”, “other” and “secretariat”. While Table V sets out the member-
ship in the specialized agencies of the United Nations as well as in the U.N.
itself. Table VI joins the alphabet of political shorthand by giving the estab-
lished abbreviations under which many of these multi-mouthsful are known.
Finally one section locates the number of organizations’ headquarters by
cities; it will not be too surprising to learn that London has 14, Paris 12,
Geneva 13, all topped by Washington with 15.
Mr. Peaslee has been as much concerned with the exotic minor institutions
as he has been with the great ones and their charters. The Inter-American
Tropical Tuna Commission and the International Olive Oil Council all have
their place in this massive scheme to demonstrate in two volumes the scope of
the universal embrace in this generation.
From the student’s point of view there are two or three observations to be
made about the situation since 1955 when the First Edition appeared. Some
very significant institutions and instruments came into being after that date.
The Antarctica Treaty Organization, the Benelux Economic Union, the Central
Treaty Organization, the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (uniting the Soviet
bloc into a kind of eastern OEEC) the European Atomic Energy Community and
above all, the European Economic Community with its competitive British
afterthought, the European Free Trade Association. To these may be added
the French Community, the major amendments to G.A.T.T., the Inter-American
Development Bank, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International
Development Association, the International Sugar Council, the Latin-American
Free Trade Association, the Warsaw Treaty Organization and others.
Moreover, the editor’s introductory notes are more detailed than in the
first edition and the bibliographies more extensive and helpful as well as more
up to date. Finally, the indexing omits the volume numbers and gives only
the page and since the paging is continuous throughout the two volumes this
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 8
is something of a handicap to its efficient use. Moreover, as with the first
edition, the index merely refers to the institution or organization under generic
heads of a geographical, functional character and it does not pretend to be an
analytical index of any serious proportions. It would have been of great
help to the user of these fine volumes if time and money had been spent on a
truly analytical index uniting many of the patterns that the student of com-
parative organizations is interested in discovering. As it is he must now read
the fine print in the documents and search for himself and while this is good
for his soul and perhaps not too bad for teaching him the elements of careful
reading and sound homework, it is-on balance-a pity that a deeper and
wider approach to indexing was not employed with its time-saving, analytical
benefits.
With all, these are among the most valuable collections of their kind and
together with Mr. Peaslee’s parallel collection of the constitutions of states, the
men of law and government now long have had a major research ally in his
private efforts.
MAXWELL COHEN
