FOR a long time it has been a rather widely accepted legal axiom that foreign decrees serving economic and social purposes of the legislative country should not be allowed to have any application outside of that country; in other words, that the assets of its nationals in another country should not become available to the government by reason of any decree appropriating such property abroad. Owners and their creditors would otherwise be deprived of the disposal of these assets in favor of the protection of the country's national economy at large. This doctrine is reflected in many court decisions of various countries which followed the events of the Soviet nationalization decrees of 1918, the Mexican oil expropriation acts and the Spanish Civil War of 1936. More recently, legislation on the commissars of the occupying authorities in Austria and Czechoslovakia,1 nationalization decrees in the Baltic countries after their military occupation by the Soviet Union in 1941,2 and the expropriation measures in Eastern Germany3 and Czechoslovakia4 were also refused any recognition as to assets located outside the boundaries of the legislating authorities. Numerous court decisions indicate that the trend of non-recognition of foreign measures outside of the legislative country has been maintained, though such decisions have often been based on the nonrecognition of a foreign government itself.5 A further reason for denying extraterritorial application to such foreign decrees has been their confiscatory character; they generally deprived owners of property abroad of its disposal without giving them fair and adequate compensation. The principle of nonrecognition of foreign economic decrees outside of the legislative country had, however, to undergo some changes during