The American Journal of International Law (AJIL) stands in dialectical tension between its American and its international identities. At its founding, and in periodic reassessments on the occasion of anniversaries or changes of leadership, its editors in chief have offered their understandings of the place for this Journal at the intersection of American and international life. One of our predecessors wrote in the Journal’s sixth decade of “a dual function, both that of laying international law material before American readers, and that of placing American viewpoints on international law before the rest of the world.” Poised at the threshold of a new century, we can take this opportunity for reflection in the image of Janus on both our American (internationalist) origins and our increasingly international (yet in some senses still American) future.

The observation that a century in the life of any person, entity, or institution is a worthy milestone holds just as true for a scholarly journal. The prevalence and permanence of academic serials, especially in the legal field, has spawned a growing literature of centennial commemorations. And while too much can be made of the anniversary of a law journal, it does serve as a propitious moment to take stock, not so much of the achievement of longevity as of its intellectual content and scholarly character. That is precisely what I intend for this appreciation of a hundred years of writing in the American Journal of International Law (AJIL).

A hundred years ago, the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) was founded by a group of publicists who believed that international law could abolish (or at least substantially diminish) the role of power in world affairs. So deep was this belief that it often served as a background operating assumption in international legal scholarship and did not even require discussion. But since 1940, dozens of articles in the Journal have focused on the relationship between law and power. Indeed, many AJIL articles have been written by scholars and practitioners whose life work has focused on power and international law—how power constrains international law (or dooms it to irrelevance), how the powerful can harness international law to their ends, and how international law may autonomously reconfigure power in its own right.

The American Society of International Law (ASIL), incorporated by Act of Congress in 1950, was founded in 1906 “to promote the establishment and maintenance of international relations on the basis of law and justice.” As we celebrate the centennial of this, the Society’s principal publication, it is appropriate to examine the present and future prospects of this project. Is it still a compelling aspiration in the era of U.S. superpower-dom?

The founding of the Society and initiation of the Journal (AJIL) must be seen in the context of the then-prevalent American commitment to the idea that a world of international law and international tribunals would be a natural, even historically inevitable, extrapolation of a good American idea. Speaking in 1890 to the first Pan-American Conference, President Benjamin Harrison congratulated the delegates on formulating a hemispheric arbitration agreement. “We rejoice,” he said, “that you have found in the organization of our Government something suggestive and worthy of imitation.” At The Hague in 1907, Secretary of State Elihu Root, the founding president of the ASIL, called for the creation of an international court “which would pass upon questions between nations with the same impartial and impersonal judgment that the Supreme Court of the United States gives to questions arising between citizens of the different States.”

The legal status of humanitarian intervention poses a profound challenge to the future of global order. The central question is easy to formulate but notoriously difficult to answer: Should international law permit states to intervene militarily to stop a genocide or comparable atrocity without Security Council authorization? That question has acquired even greater significance in the wake of military interventions in Kosovo and Iraq, and nonintervention in the Sudan. Concerted deliberation on these issues, however, has reached an impasse. A key obstacle to legalizing unilateral humanitarian intervention (UHI) is the overriding concern that states would use the pretext of humanitarian intervention to wage wars for ulterior motives. In this article, I argue that it is just as likely, or even more likely, that the impact on states would be the opposite. Drawing on recent empirical studies, I contend that legalizing UHI should in important respects discourage wars with ulterior motives, and I discuss changes to international legal institutions that would amplify that potential effect.

Modern international law takes as a fundamental value the condemnation and redress of certain categories of heinous conduct, such as genocide, torture, and crimes against humanity. Recognizing the need to end impunity for those crimes, international law permits a state, by the principle of universal jurisdiction, to prosecute them even when they take place outside its territory and do not involve its nationals.

In virtually all domestic legal systems, an individual who engages in wrongful conduct causing personal inj ury or death will be subject not only to criminal prosecution, but to a civil action by the injured party. Yet, though the principle of universal jurisdiction is well established in the criminal sphere, it is still regarded as novel in the civil context.

Recent developments—most notably the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain—will cause greater examination of the function and scope of universal jurisdiction as authorization for national courts to hear civil claims based on heinous conduct proscribed by international law. We here consider whether a civil dimension of universal jurisdiction has emerged, whether it should correspond to the criminal dimension, and whether its use as a basis of jurisdiction should depend on the absence of effective remedies in jurisdictions with traditional links to the proscribed conduct.

On March 8, 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a declaration on human cloning (the Declaration) by a recorded vote of 84 to 34, with 37 abstentions.1 The Declaration culminated an effort that had commenced in 2001 with a proposal by France and Germany for a convention against reproductive cloning of human beings. The three-and-ahalf- year negotiation that followed was intense and emotionally charged with religious and cultural overtones; at times, participants seemed to feel hopelessly mired. The Declaration that was ultimately adopted was often referred to as a “political declaration,” apparently as a way of emphasizing the degree of compromise reflected in the text, and also as away of minimizing its normative value. The negotiation, which had originally been understood as limited to the narrow bioethics issue of prohibiting the making of cloned babies, led to profound discussions on human rights, cultural and religious diversities, and their interaction and priorities in case of conflict. Ultimately, neither the Declaration nor its negotiating history answered these difficult questions. But they provided a glimpse of the difficulties and impasses international lawmaking will confront when negotiations lose a secular tone.