Completing the Circle

Although 39 nations pay at least lip service to its authority, the World Court at The Hague has never been permitted to live up to its resounding name. Properly known as the International Court of Justice, it is the top U.N. judicial tribunal, but no major power (including the U.S.) is yet willing to bind itself unconditionally to accept the court's decisions.

Nonetheless, the functioning of the World Court--it passes on international disputes when the contending powers ask it to do so and delivers advisory opinions to U.N. bodies--serves as a reminder of the existence of international law and of the hope that it may one day rule the world. And when the court's 15 judges, resplendent in black robes and white jabots, assemble in their chamber in The Hague's Palace of Peace, they represent the world's legal conscience. Named last week by the U.N. General Assembly to join this select circle were six replacements for retiring judges. Most notable newcomers:

P:The U.S.S.R.'s scholarly Vladimir Koretsky, who hews to the essentially collectivist notion that "man should have no rights that place him in opposition to the community."

P:Kotaro Tanaka, conservative ex-Chief Justice of Japan and a convert to Roman Catholicism, whose deep respect for the law was outraged by the actions of Tokyo's snake-dancing anti-U.S. rioters earlier this year ("influenced by a foreign power").

P:The U.S.'s Philip C. Jessup, currently an associate of the Rockefeller Foundation and a famed theorist on international law whose practical experience dates back to the days of the League of Nations, where he assisted crusty old Elihu Root in dealings with the League's Permanent Court of International Justice. Jessup's career suffered a setback during the McCarthy heyday when the Senate, on the strength of a 1951 Internal Security Subcommittee investigation, withheld confirmation of his appointment as a U.S. delegate to the U.N. (Senators objected to his connections with the Red-infiltrated Institute of Pacific Relations and his editing of a 1949 State Department white paper which flatly blamed Chiang Kai-shek for the fall of China.) In effect, if not by design, Washington's nomination of Jessup to his new (and taxfree) null post constituted a final clearance.

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