Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Purposeful Ambiguity As International Legal Strategy: The Two China Problem, Anthony D'Amato
Purposeful Ambiguity As International Legal Strategy: The Two China Problem, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
For every definable term in international law there are clear cases and fuzzy cases. Everyone accepts that the term "state" applies to Paraguay, Poland, Portugal and over a hundred other clear cases, but does it apply to Puerto Rico, Western Samoa, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Gibraltar, or the Vatican City? The word "treaty" has thousands of clear applications, but does it apply to an exchange of faxes between two governments or a handshake between two diplomats at a cocktail party? In addition to ambiguities of this kind, international law is replete with deliberately created ambiguities. One of …
Is International Law Really ‘Law’?, Anthony D'Amato
Is International Law Really ‘Law’?, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
International law is enforced by the process I describe as reciprocal-entitlement violation. The violation may be of the same entitlement or, more likely, of a different entitlement. But it is on the whole an effective process—as effective for the international legal system as is the enforcement of most laws in domestic systems via the state-sanctioned deprivation of one or more entitlements held by individual citizens or corporations. It is impossible to understand why nations do or refrain from doing the things they do without understanding what the entitlements are and how nations act to preserve their full complement of existing …
Treaties As A Source Of General Rules Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato
Treaties As A Source Of General Rules Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
Attempts a theoretical explanation of the power of treaties to extend their rules to nations not parties to them—to rationalize, in a nonpejorative use of that term, the Court's citation of the Bancroft treaties in Nottebohm and its use of treaty provisions in other cases—and to provide a basis for the continued use of the contents of treaties in assessing the requirements of international law. Thus this paper is basically argumentative—it attempts to state what the law ought to be by demonstrating that the law as it is logically compels the adoption of the present thesis