Herczegh Géza: General principles of law and the international legal order (Budapest, 1969)

G. HERCZEG GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF LAW AND THE INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ORDER Discussing the statutes of the Permanent Court of International Justice and of the International Court of Justice, the author pres­ents a concise survey of the expert opinions in the literature and describes the relevant legal prac­tice. He lays down that the various forms of agreements between sov­ereign states, whether expressly manifest or tacitly understood, should be regarded as technical or legal sources of international law, i.e. the international conventions and international custom. The general principles of law recog­nized by civilized nations, as men­tioned in Article 38 of the Statutes, cannot be regarded as sources of international law, though interna­tional courts may resort to these when they have to fill so-called gaps of law in deciding an inter­national dispute. Their task is to promote the evolution of a rather rigid international law by supply­ing fresh rules from the domain of municipal law, more developed from the point of view of legal technique. This work will provoke interest primarily among the scholars of public international law, but re­presentatives of comparative juris­prudence and experts of legal theory may also profit from the much­­debated problem presented by this book. AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ Publishing House of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Budapest

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