I'll join the chorus of praise for my colleague Duncan's book. It will clearly become the standard reference work in the area. As IL scholarship proliferates, there is a lot of smart money in handbook volumes such as this one. The Oxford Guide to Treaties is a one-stop source for the best thinking on the subject. Duncan is also to be...
[Geir Ulfstein is Professor of Public and International Law at the University of Oslo] Treaty law is increasingly acquiring a public character. One reason is that more and more treaties set up treaty bodies, i.e. organs that are neither formal international organizations nor international courts. Examples are the Conference of the parties (COPs) used in international environmental law, the Antarctic Treaty...
The EU has welcomed progress made late last week by the International Civil Aviation Organization on a the regulation of global aviation greenhouse gas emissions. Syrian opposition groups have agreed to unite and have chosen Moaz al-Khatib as their leader. Spillovers of the conflict have meanwhile affected Israeli presence in the Golan Heights. At an emergency ECOWAS summit, West African leaders have agreed to send a...
Upcoming Events The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will hold an event in Chicago on Wednesday, November 14, 2012. Michael Dobbs, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Goldfarb Fellow, will discuss the Hague trial of Ratko Mladic. The Working Group on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the Netherlands School for Human Rights Research is hosting a research seminar entitled Economic, Social and Cultural...
With the US elections dominating the headlines this week, Peter Spiro argued that the impact of the US president on populations who are unable to vote in the election, and are not even allowed to make campaign contributions, reveals another limit of state-based institutions. Deborah Pearlstein asked whether President Obama's promise that a "decade of war is ending" includes the "war"...
Cross-posted at Balkinization Of the many memorable lines in President Obama’s eloquent victory speech on Tuesday, the Chicago crowd reserved some of its greatest applause not for the line trumpeting the economy’s ongoing recovery, but for the news that “a decade of war” was coming to an end. Tuesday’s speech was not the first time the President has made such...
[Jean Galbraith is Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Camden School of Law] Congratulations to Duncan Hollis and the contributors to The Oxford Guide to Treaties [OGT]. This is a magnificent volume -- one that fully lives up to its aim of “explor[ing] treaty questions from theoretical, doctrinal, and practical perspectives.” For an edited volume, it is a remarkably coherent treatise. Personal views of...
For the past 15 years courts, tribunals, practicing lawyers and academics concerned with treaty interpretation have been paying increasing attention to the three articles on the topic in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Because the International Law Commission as architect of these provisions confined their drafts to what they saw as general principles, stated laconically and...
The International Court of Justice will deliver its judgment in Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v. Colombia) on Monday, November 19, 2012 at 3:00 p.m. (Hague time). The European Court of Human Rights upheld the German judgment that placed a ban on the use of holocaust images in a PETA animal-rights campaign poster. Human Rights Watch published a report on migrant women...
[Ed Swaine is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School] I'm pleased that the subject of reservations, which is near and dear to my heart, is attracting the attention of such esteemed commentators. The illuminating comments by Professor Stewart and Dean Koh, which I had the chance to read while preparing this post, focused in part on the severability solution,...
[Marko Milanovic is Lecturer at the University of Nottingham School of Law] I am grateful to Duncan for inviting me to contribute to this conversation, inspired by his important new book. Let me continue where David Stewart and Harold Koh left off, namely with the issue of the validity of reservations and the innovations in that regard in the ILC's freshly...
[Harold Hongju Koh is the Legal Adviser, U.S. Department of State.] Professor Duncan Hollis’ magisterial new book, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, collects an enormously useful amount of up-to-the-minute scholarship on myriad pressing questions of international treaty law. Its publication comes at a particularly opportune moment, as the International Law Commission’s (ILC’s) Guide to Practice on Reservations to Treaties was finalized by the...
