Law Commons^™

Understanding The "Other" International Agreements, Ryan Harrington

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

The President routinely enters into international agreements with foreign states that circumvent the requirements in the Treaty Clause, leaving many researchers with a cloudy

understanding of the international agreement-making process in the United States. In many instances, Congress has preauthorized the President to negotiate and conclude an international commitment. In others, the majority of both houses of Congress, rather than two-thirds of the Senate, approve of an international agreement. Even more troublingly, in the last half century, the United States has come to rely on yet another form of international agreements, called “political commitments,” that create nonlegally binding expectations and …

Flying The Flag, Aaron S. Kirschenfeld

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

This paper analyzes the accuracy with which descriptions of subsequent negative treatment are applied by an online citator system that employs a hierarchical controlled vocabulary -- Shepard's Citations -- as opposed to one that does not -- KeyCite. After a contextual review of the citator's history, a framework for assessment is proposed and employed to test the hypothesis that a citator employing a hierarchical controlled vocabulary would produce more accurate descriptions. The study's results suggest that a system making use of a hierarchical controlled vocabulary does apply descriptions of subsequent negative treatment in a marginally more accurate way. A discussion …