1 PURPOSE AND TOPIC We live in the age of treaties. Increasingly, bilateral and multilateral written agreements are used for the creation of new international legal standards. For political reasons, states are decreasingly less willing to rely upon customary international law for the regulation of legal matters. New technology and growing international exchange have established the need for an ever more precise and flexible international law a need not satisfactorily met by customary law. In many fields of activity, we can seriously question whether the creation of a rule of custom is at all...