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Treaties As Laws: A Defense Of The Last-In-Time Rule For Treaties And Federal Statutes, Julian G. Ku

Indiana Law Journal

For nearly 150 years, courts have applied the "last-in-time" rule to resolve conflicts between treaties and federal statutes by giving effect to whichever was enacted later in time. Despite its acceptance by the courts, this rule has received unanimous criticism in the legal academy. In this article, I present the first comprehensive defense of the last-in-time rule on textual, structural, historical, and functional grounds. I argue that the last-in-time rule should be applied because the text of the Constitution grants treaties the status of enacted domestic law. As such, treaties are subject to the principle of statutory construction, leges posteriors …