Its twenty-second year was a lean year for the Permanent Court of International Justice. No meeting was held by the Court, no case was referred to it, and no prospect appeared for an early resumption of its activities.

During the course of some thirteen years, from the Fifth International Conference of American States at Santiago in 1923 to the Conference for the Maintenance of Peace at Buenos Aires in 1936, the American Republics adopted a wide variety of treaties and conventions dealing with the pacific settlement of disputes arising between them. These agreements cover all of the generally accepted procedures, except that of judicial settlement in the sense of submission to a permanent court as distinct from an arbitral tribunal. Each of the separate procedures appears to have been adopted without any plan of coordinating it with other procedures, with the result that there is duplication and overlapping of provisions and occasionally open contradiction. There is no logical progression of obligations so that a dispute could, at the initiative of a plaintiff State, go forward from one procedure to another until final settlement.

The current war has been marked by a drastic extension of the practice of taking hostages. Ever since antiquity such action has constituted a permissible expedient, as frequent in peacetime as during war. Only recently, however, has it become a major weapon of warfare. The contemporary experience of total war necessitates a revaluation of the law and practice in regard to hostages. German actions in this war have involved such marked disregard of international law as to bring into question the entire legal foundation of the taking of hostages.

The present world war has made further changes in the constitutional relations among the nations of the British Commonwealth. This was to be expected, for each great crisis has left its mark on that relationship in the past. The first world war ended the purely colonial period in the history of the Dominions. Their military contributions to the Allied war effort gave them a claim to equal recognition with other small states and to a voice in the formation of policy. This claim was recognized within the Empire by the creation of the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917, and within the community of nations by Dominion signatures to the Treaty of Versailles and by separate Dominion representation in the League of Nations.

It is proposed to deal in this article with the English law concerning the legal status of the United States forces present in the territory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland during the present war. The history of, and the controversies regarding, the legal position of friendly armed forces on foreign territory in international law remain outside of the scope of the present survey, which is devoted to the municipal aspect of the matter. In order, however, to give a picture of the whole body of English law applicable to the American forces we shall include a few remarks on the development of the question in English municipal and British imperial law, and it will also be necessary to compare the provisions concerning the United States forces with those regulating the status of the other allied and associated forces at present stationed in the British Isles, as well as with the provisions regarding visiting Dominion troops. As will be seen later there has been a certain amount of interdependence between international and interimperial relations with regard to the legal problem with which we are concerned.

On December 14, 1939, the twentieth Assembly of the League of Nations authorized the Secretary-General to convene its General Committee and empowered it to decide any question which the Secretary-General and the Supervisory Commission might submit to it until the next session of the Assembly. Since the Assembly also authorized the Secretary-General, with the approval of a majority of the Supervisory Commission, “to take any exceptional administrative or financial measures or decisions which appear necessary” until the next session of the Assembly, the purpose of providing for a meeting of the General Committee would appear to have been to enable measures or decisions other than administrative or financial to be taken if in the opinion of the Secretary-General they were necessary.