Law and the Indochina War: a retrospective view

This century, from the Hague Conferences through the Vietnam War, has seen a profound change in attitudes toward the role of law as a constraint upon foreign policy. The Hague Conferences represented at once an attempt, however feeble, by men of mixed motives to emplace fledgling prophylactic legal institutions upon the tendencies of the nation-states to resolve disputes by war, and at the same time to limit war's destructiveness if prevention failed.