President/Executive Department Commons^™

Four Problems With The Draft Restatement’S Treatment Of Treaty Self-Execution, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The American Law Institute has embarked on the challenging task of restating the confounding distinction between self-executing and non-self-executing treaties. In some respects, the current draft of the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law represents an advance from the treatment of the subject in the Third Restatement (Third). At the same time, the current draft retains, and may even aggravate, some of the flaws of that earlier treatment. This Essay suggests four ways the current draft could be improved. First, the draft should explicitly recognize that the concept of self-execution is not a unitary one. The "self-executing" label encompasses four …