The State Immunity Act 1978 (the Act) came into force in the United Kingdom on November 22, 1978. Preceded by much-noted and bold decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and of the Court of Appeal, the Act puts an end to the old British doctrine of absolute immunity and endorses the restrictive doctrine.

The U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (the Act), which became effective on January 19, 1977, sought to codify the substantive law of sovereign immunity in the United States, while also modifying it in certain respects. An even more important goal was to make the application of such law more uniform, fair, and hence predictable, by relieving the Department of State of the responsibility to determine claims of such immunity, and remitting them exclusively to judicial determination, preferably in federal courts. Now, 2 years after it first took effect, it is appropriate to review the roughly two dozen cases that have applied and interpreted the Act, as well as certain questions that have otherwise arisen in practice, in order to ascertain whether (and, if so, where) significant uncertainties remain and amendment of the Act may be in order. Further, the taking effect of the new State Immunity Act 1978 in the United Kingdom on November 22, 1978, has provided an opportunity to see what others have learned from our experience. It also demonstrates the extent to which they have diverged from our design, suggesting the ultimate utility of a broad international convention on the subject.

Liquid mineral deposits that extend across a national frontier on land territory or a dividing line on the continental shelf between adjacent or opposite states have increasingly attracted attention in international law during the last two decades. Several common deposits of petroleum or natural gas have recently been discovered, and since the early sixties a considerable number of international agreements have been concluded to deal with the problems of those deposits. This development gives rise to certain considerations regarding an emerging legal concept of cooperation between neighboring states, as has already occurred with water resources shared by two or more states.

International law, its masters tell us, is “the vanishing point of jurisprudence.” So must be international politics, and all of international relations, for political theory. The recurrent and directing theme in political theory is the problem of order—how it is provided, maintained, altered, and so on. Order resides in orderly relations, that is, patterned and predictable relations, among people, but is abstracted from those relations as any arrangement of norms and institutions that distributes values among people. Among peoples, political theorists favor the alternative premise that anarchy, not order, reigns. By not existing, international order needs no explaining. Evidence to the contrary can be explained away as anomalous or ephemeral, and therefore not of theoretical interest. From this follows the dominance of concern for conflict and disorder and the paucity of theory in the study of international politics.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.