[ David Sloss, Professor of
Law and Director of the Center for Global
Law and Policy, Santa Clara University School of
Law, describes his recently published article, Executing Foster v. Neilson: The Two-Step
Approach to Analyzing Self-Executing Treaties. This article is part of the Third Harvard International
Law Journal/Opinio Juris
Symposium.] The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Medellin v. Texas unleashed a flood of new scholarship on the doctrine of self-executing treaties. Unfortunately, the entire debate has been founded on two erroneous assumptions. First, courts and commentators have assumed that...