Dreams Born and Shattered 363the other persuasion. He held that codifi cation, by its nature, entails the
making of new law and is therefore essentially a legislative task— and conse-
quently one for politicians.
As it happened, the period witnessed noteworthy codifi cation initiatives of
both kinds. Th e po liti cal one took place at the initiative of the League of Na-
tions, and the private one by a team of scholars based at Harvard Law School
in the United States. Th e League’s codifi cation conference met in Th e Hague
in 1930, with forty- two states represented, including the United States (plus
an observer from the Soviet Union, which was not then a League member).
Schücking was present for Germany, and Manley Hudson for the United
States. No attempt was made to codify the whole of international law. In-
stead, three subject areas were selected: confl ict- of- nationality questions, ter-
ritorial waters, and liability of states for injuries to foreign nationals.
Th e results proved meager. Th e subject of nationality was the one on which
the Hague Conference made the greatest progress, in the form of a multilat-
eral convention dealing with various problems arising from confl icts of na-
tionality laws (e.g., from dual nationality). On the topic of territorial waters,
an attempt was made to reach agreement on the width of territorial seas. But
the most that could be achieved was a survey of the diversity of state practice
in the area. Least successful of all was the attempt to codify the law on state
liability for injuries to foreigners. It found ered on the inability to resolve two
crucial questions. First was whether states are under a general duty to exer-
cise due diligence to prevent injuries from occurring to foreigners. Second
was whether there is an international standard of treatment of foreigners or
merely a nondiscrimination principle, as advocated by Calvo.
Th e most ambitious scholarly codifi cation initiative of the technical kind
was conducted under the auspices of the Harvard Law School in the United
States (with the fi nancial support of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace). Under the overall direction of Manley Hudson, the Harvard research
project concluded a series of thirteen draft conventions in the period 1929– 39,
on a broad range of subjects: from diplomatic and consular law, to territorial
waters, extradition, the law of treaties, nationality, injuries to aliens, and neu-
trality. None of these, however, was ever adopted as binding law by states. So,
for all of its scholarly value, the Harvard project had little practical impact.
Th e Harvard codifi ers were not afraid to break new ground. In the area of
neutrality, they proposed signifi cant changes in the existing law. A convention