The League of Nations and the International Law of State Responsibility

Abstract

The League of Nations set up The Hague codification conference that focused, among three specific agendas, on the responsibility of states for damage caused in their territory to the person or property of foreigners. Scholarship has dominantly ignored or considered the work of the League of Nations in the law of state responsibility as a failure, starting the story of the codification with the International Law Commission. This article proposes to rethink the dominant view and claims that the League of Nations’s codification process not only initiated, but substantially contributed to the codification of the law of state responsibility, leading to lasting methods, concepts, principles and norms that have been integrated in the contemporary canon of the rules of state responsibility.

Keywords: League of Nations, State Responsibility, International Law, Codification, International Law Commission, Attribution, Circumstances Precluding Wrongfulness, Protection of Foreigners