Suchergebnisse

In Geological Time a quarter of a century does not rate high on the scale of perspectives. But for law and lawyers, for ongoing politics and policies, twenty-five years in an age of electronic communications, ballistic missile speeds, and space activities can include a planetary march of revolutionary proportions. Indeed, the rise and fall of empires now may be counted in years or decades rather than in centuries. The paradox of our age is that the future marks a constant acceleration of political processes, with conservative forces such as law and other social controls hard put to keep up with escaping events. The compression of time at the end of the twentieth century is its dominant feature.

Among the classical problems of democratic government perhaps few are so continuing in their challenge to the political imagination as the creation of better methods to balance the interests and the strategies of the governors and the governed. While in a loose sense democratic systems posit the notion that 'sovereignty' lies with 'the people' it is not without significance that the New Left and their varied allies now employ "power to the people" as a slogan that becomes a critique of the conventional machinery of representative government. For these reasons there are to be found, increasingly, in many western democratic countries varieties of institutions that attempt to better 'communication' between citizen and officeholder, and perhaps more important than communication, methods that attempt to increase the participatory input into the decision-making sector by the public, or technically competent portions of it.

Launchings are Fashionable in the space age. But to "launch" a Canadian Yearbook of International Law has nothing of the drama of a Canaveral countdown nor does it represent the combined technology of an era at its highest point of achievement. Yet it may be regarded as a desirable national effort to provide a forum for the data and the ideas of international law derived both from Canadian experience and from general theory and practice.