First of all, I need to say thank you to all the contributors to the current symposium on my book, The Oxford Guide to Treaties. It's quite common in academic circles to have symposia on "affairs of the day" (and, to be clear, those affairs often trigger very important issues like targeted killing, cyberwar, climate change, the EU fiscal crisis,...
[Catherine Brölmann is Associate Professor of Public International Law at the University of Amsterdam] Particular features in the interpretation of constitutive treaties or secondary acts of international organizations reflect the special nature of the law of organizations, which brings both contractual and institutional features in the treaty process. Following up on posts of Richard Gardiner, who brings up pertinent questions regarding treaty...
[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...
[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...
[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...
[David P. Stewart is a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center] Duncan Hollis deserves hearty congratulations on the publication of the Oxford Guide to Treaties. There’s no doubt that it will quickly become the essential reference for lawyers and other treaty specialists in foreign ministries and international organizations everywhere, to say nothing of judges, professors and private practitioners. ...
I'm extraordinarily pleased to be able to announce that today marks the start of the Opinio Juris symposium on my recently-edited volume, The Oxford Guide to Treaties (you can buy your copy here and there's even a discount for Opinio Juris readers!). The Oxford Guide provides a current and comprehensive guide to treaty law and practice. It does this in two parts. First,...
Attentive readers will note our calendar had indicated that we were supposed to start a new symposium today on The Oxford Guide to Treaties. It appears, however, that we are not immune from hurricane Sandy’s effects. I've received several requests for postponement from participants given this week's events and I'm also told that much of New York City and other areas in...
[Jan Wouters is Professor of International Law and International Organizations, Jean Monnet Chair Ad Personam EU and Global Governance, and Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and Institute for International Law at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and Sanderijn Duquet is a Junior Member of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies.] We would like to take a moment to...
