June 2014

Bond Cheat Sheet

As David Kaye notes, treaty-power advocates everywhere may be breathing a collective sigh of relief with the Supreme Court's decision in Bond v. United States. I'm not so sure how big a difference it makes, given the Senate's persistent refusal to put an expansive treaty power to work. From an academic perspective the decision is a big let-down. No big...

Guest Post: Silences in the Bond Case

[Jean Galbraith is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers School of Law - Camden] Thank you to Opinio Juris for letting me guest blog on Bond. The most notable thing about the Bond decision is a resounding silence.  As a matter of law, it should have been easy to find for the government.  The statutory text reads plainly in the government’s favor, and constitutional text, practice, and precedent easily support the conclusion that the federal government can override federalism interests in implementing constitutionally valid treaties.  Yet not a single justice sided with the United States.  This silence is particularly perplexing given that three justices at oral argument seemed sympathetic to the government. That is the major silence, but there are silences of reasoning in the opinions as well.  In what follows, I focus on two silences.  The first is the lack of consideration in the majority opinion of how treaty-implementing statutes might differ as a matter of statutory construction from ordinary statutes.  The second is the startling absence of constitutional history from the Framing onward in Justice Scalia’s concurrence.

The Majority Opinion

As Peter Spiro has noted, the majority ducks the constitutional question of whether the Treaty Power plus the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to criminalize domestic poisonings like that of Ms. Bond.  Following a hint dropped by Justice Kennedy at oral argument, the Court does this by holding that there needs to be a “clear statement that Congress meant the statute to reach local criminal conduct.”  It isn’t enough for Congress to use broad language that seems to cover the act at issue; instead, Congress apparently has to do something more to signal specific intent to reach “local” conduct.  Congress didn’t do so here, so Ms. Bond wins. I won’t deconstruct the merits of this approach, although I think Justice Scalia does a good job in his concurrence of showing why it is problematic.  But I do want to mention that it leads to an interesting divergence between the interpretation of a treaty and the interpretation of implementing legislation.  The Court spent very little time on the interpretation of the Chemical Weapons Convention itself, merely noting its “doubts” that the Convention was meant to reach ordinary domestic poisonings.  If it had wanted to, the Court could doubtless have done more to interpret the Convention this way (e.g., by explicit discussion of “object and purpose” or perhaps by drawing on rule-of-lenity-related principles in international and comparative law).  But instead the Court accepted a wedge between the interpretation of a treaty and of its implementing legislation.  Federalism principles do not matter to treaty interpretation (given that these principles are country-specific) but do matter to the interpretation of implementing legislation.  If this canon of construction is about Congressional intent, then it strikes me as odd, because there is a countervailing consideration not mentioned by the Court. This is that when Congress uses language that closely tracks a treaty’s language in implementing the treaty, Congress presumably does so because it wants convergence rather than divergence with the treaty.

Justice Scalia’s Concurrence

Supreme Court Ducks Broad Treaty Power Ruling in Bond v. United States

The decision is here. The Court found unanimously that the federal government overreached in prosecuting Carol Anne Bond under a federal statute implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention for what was otherwise a simple assault in a lovers' quarrel. The six-justice majority decided the case on non-constitutional, statutory grounds -- interpreting the statute (and the treaty) not to cover such conduct, but...

Weekly News Wrap: Monday, June 2, 2014

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa China and the African Development Bank jointly unveiled a US$2 billion multilateral investment fund last week, marking a symbolic shift in their partnership.  A bombing in a bar in Nigeria's northeast has killed at least 14 people and injured another 14 in the second attack targeting football fans...