March 2013

Bradley Book Symposium: Kristina Daugirdas on Delegations to International Institutions

[Kristina Daugirdas is Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan Law] I'm delighted to have the opportunity to comment on Professor Curt Bradley's excellent new book. Before getting to the question of how the decisions and orders of international institutions are integrated into U.S. law—Professor Bradley's main focus in this chapter—it's worth pausing to consider why states bother to create international institutions at all. States could have drafted a series of treaties that simply codified substantive obligations relating to various issue areas. Instead, they created institutions and delegated authority to them to do things like monitor how diligently states are implementing their international obligations, resolve disputes about the scope of those obligations, and revise those obligations in response to new technological developments or growing scientific knowledge. These delegations can make the regimes more effective by spurring compliance and ensuring that states' international obligations remain current. It's exactly the features that make international institutions so useful that raise constitutional questions for the United States. For example, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) establishes a Technical Secretariat whose tasks include monitoring states' compliance with their obligations. This inspection regime makes the CWC more effective by increasing the likelihood that noncompliance will be exposed. But some scholars have argued that these provisions are incompatible with the Appointments Clause (because the inspections are undertaken by international officials) as well as the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Bradley Book Symposium: The Reality of International Delegations

When I was just out of law school and desperately seeking advice as to what to write about, I turned to Professor Bradley for ideas.  He recommended that I buy Louis Henkin’s treatise Foreign Affairs and the United States Constitution (a book I had somehow never heard of during my three years of law school).  Amazon.com informs me that I followed Professor Bradley’s advice and bought the book on October 8, 1999.   Thus, thanks to Professor Henkin (and Professor Bradley!), much of my early academic work was inspired by what I learned about in the Henkin treatise. As Professor Bradley advised me, the Henkin treatise is learned, concise, clear, and comprehensive.  But as much as I respect the treatise, I must admit I have never been happy with the idea of it being the authoritative statement of U.S. foreign relations law.  I found Henkin’s sometimes dismissive treatment of questions of constitutional structure frustrating.  In other words, I always believed that a new foreign affairs law treatise reflecting contemporary debates and understandings was needed.   Well, that treatise has finally arrived in the form of Professor Bradley’s International Law in the U.S. Legal System.

Bradley Book Symposium: The Scope of the Treaty Power

In February of 1793, President Washington’s cabinet debated the negotiating instructions for a forthcoming treaty with Indian tribes in the Ohio region.  One issue was whether they could authorize the cessation of land back to the Indian tribes.  Thomas Jefferson took the view that this lay outside of the delegated powers of the federal government.  Alexander Hamilton responded “that the power of treaty was given to [the President and the Senate] by the constitution, without restraining it to particular objects, consequently that it was given in as plenipotentiary a form as held by any sovereign in any other society.”  After the other two cabinet members expressed views more in line with Hamilton than Jefferson, Washington urged them all to reach a consensus.  “He seemed to direct those efforts more towards me,” Jefferson recorded dryly, “but the thing could not be done.” Fast-forward to today – and we are still far from consensus on the exact contours of the treaty power in our constitutional system.  In a chapter on treaties in his excellent new book, International Law in the U.S. Legal System, Professor Curtis Bradley provides a doctrinal map of the treaty power, complete with thoughtful assessments of the level of certainty that attaches to each feature.  In this blog post, I’ll briefly describe Professor Bradley’s overall approach, then focus more specifically on Professor Bradley’s discussion of the scope of the treaty power, and close with a few remarks on the Bond case now pending in the Supreme Court.

Bradley Book Symposium: David Moore comments on Treaties

[David Moore is Professor of Law at BYU Law] Curtis Bradley’s “International Law in the U.S. Legal System” is a welcome and significant contribution to U.S. Foreign Relations Law.  Like Louis Henkin’s “Foreign Affairs and the United States Constitution,” it will be a resource that scholars will want to consult and cite as well as recommend to their students and have on reserve. The portion of the book on treaties addresses a wide-range of topics from treaty creation to non-self-execution to termination.  In addition to providing a clear overview of these topics and the sometimes unsettled questions they present, the discussion reveals an unspoken theme only partially captured by the book’s title.  Given its focus, the book is appropriately titled “International Law in the U.S. Legal System,” but the treatment of international law in U.S. law reveals that the interaction between U.S. and international law is not unidirectional.  International law affects U.S. law, even U.S. constitutional law, but U.S. law also affects international law. On the incoming side of the relationship, international law produces a range of effects on the domestic legal order.  Most passively, international law presents questions that domestic law must answer.  For example, Bradley notes that the international law of treaties recognizes that state parties may terminate their agreements under certain circumstances, such as material breach of a bilateral agreement.  The international law option to terminate raises the question of who within the domestic order can exercise that option.   Moreover, international law might go further and influence the answer to that question as the nature of international law may functionally favor a particular actor as the one best suited to exercise the termination power.  This sort of effect has arguably occurred in the context of determining the subject matter scope of the treaty power.  Bradley notes repeated historical suggestions that treaty-making might extend only to certain types of treaties or at least to matters of international concern.  International law, however, defines “treaty” very broadly by reference to the nature of the contracting parties and the obligations assumed, largely without reference to subject matter restraints.  Consistent with this approach, treaty-making has spanned a vast range of issues.  The breadth of international treaty-making is almost certainly a contributing factor to the current sense that the Constitution does not impose subject matter limitations on the treaty power.  With the Supreme Court positioned to address subject matter limitations on the treaty-making power next term in Bond v. United States, the link between international law and domestic definition of the treaty power may be broken.  At this point, however, the connection is apparent.