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 …