Bringing Treaty Research into the 21st Century

For years, researching U.S. treaty-making was a daunting task. Publication of U.S. treaties and other international agreements in the United States Treaties (UST) and Treaties and Other International Agreements (TIAS) series lagged years (if not decades) behind. Other materials (e.g., reservations, instruments of ratification, the travaux preparatoire) were often unavailable, incomplete, or required checking multiple sources. And anything you did find was likely in hard copy – internet resources were hard to come by.

Fortunately, the situation appears to be improving, thanks to an infusion of cash from Congress, more personnel in the Treaty Office, and a new statutory commitment to make treaties available electronically (see Section 7121 of P.L. 108-458). As I’ve noted before, the State Department now makes the texts of international agreements other than treaties available on its web-site in a collection that runs from 1998 to the present (see its “International Agreements Collection” here). More recently, the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser for Treaty Affairs (L/T) has put together a new website (see here).

Now L/T’s website won’t answer all your research inquiries, but it’s certainly better than the old system, where you’d have to call the Treaty Office to get your document faxed to you. For example, L/T’s website has an electronic version of Treaties in Force, listing all treaties and international agreements currently binding the United States. There’s also a section on “Treaty Actions” along with a “Highlights” sidebar, detailing recent treaty transmittals to the Senate and other treaty-related activity. Moreover, the site has useful background information. It includes a discussion of the legal authorities that support U.S. treaty-making, including an explanation of the Circular 175 procedure by which the negotiation and conclusion of all U.S. international agreements (including those at the agency level) are approved through an interagency process.

The site is obviously still a work in progress. I found the “Treaties and Other International Act Series” section a bit frustrating — it currently only has documents from 1996 and 1997. It would also be helpful to have the site include hard-to-find texts (e.g., instruments of ratification, including U.S. treaty reservations, understandings and declarations). Still, it’s a new, useful resource and one that will make future research a bit easier when combined with existing resources (see here, for example, to read Marci Hoffman’s superb overview of U.S. treaty research tools and methods).