International Law in Supreme Court - Santa Clara LawSanta Clara Law

International Law in the Supreme Court: Continuity or Change?

was held at Santa Clara Law on Friday, November 6 and Saturday, November 7, 2009

Table of Contents
Speaker Bios
Schedule

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Supreme Court has decided a series of high-profile cases related to international law. In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain (2004), the Court considered the federal judiciary’s role in applying customary international law under the Alien Tort Statute. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Roper v. Simmons (2005), the Court used international law as a tool for helping to resolve difficult constitutional issues arising under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), the Court grappled with questions involving the proper interpretation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. In Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon (2006) and Medellin v. Texas (2008), the Court confronted questions involving the U.N. Charter, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the domestic effects of judgments of the International Court of Justice.

Each of these decisions produced fairly strident dissents. In almost every case, the dissent accused the majority of departing significantly from established precedents. During this conference, scholars will evaluate recent Supreme Court decisions involving international law against the backdrop of eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century precedents and historical developments. The main questions to be addressed are: In what respects do the twenty-first century decisions represent a break from the past? In what respects are those decisions consistent with earlier practice and precedents? From a historical perspective, how can we account for both the continuity and the discontinuity?

The first day of the conference will focus on the history of international law in the Supreme Court from 1789 to 2000. The second day will focus on key Supreme Court cases decided in the past decade, evaluating those cases against the backdrop of the historical analysis developed on day one. Revised versions of the conference papers will be collected in a book published by Cambridge University Press.

The U.S. Supreme Court and International Law: Continuity or Change?
David L. Sloss, Michael D. Ramsey and William S. Dodge (editors)

I. Introduction, 1789-1860 (David Sloss, Michael Ramsey, William Dodge)

II. The Supreme Court and International Law, 1860-1900

Chapter 1. Treaties and the Court, 1860-1900 (Duncan Hollis)
Chapter 2. Customary International Law and the Court, 1860-1900 (David Bederman)
Chapter 3. International Law as an Interpretive Tool, 1860-1900 (Tom Lee & David Sloss)
Chapter 4. Historical Commentary, 1860-1900 (John Fabian Witt)

III. The Supreme Court and International Law, 1900-1945

Chapter 5. Treaties and the Court, 1900-1945 (Michael Van Alstine)
Chapter 6. Customary International Law and the Court, 1900-1945 (Michael Ramsey)
Chapter 7. International Law as an Interpretive Tool, 1900-1945 (Roger Alford)
Chapter 8. Historical Commentary, 1900-1945 (Edward Purcell)

IV. The Supreme Court and International Law, 1945-2000

Chapter 9. Treaties and the Court, 1945-2000 (Paul Stephan)
Chapter 10. Customary International Law and the Court, 1945-2000 (William Dodge)
Chapter 11. International Law as an Interpretive Tool, 1945-2000 (Melissa Waters)
Chapter 12. Historical Commentary, 1945-2000 (Martin Flaherty)

V. The Supreme Court and International Law After 2000: Continuity or Change?

A. Review Essay — Treaties: Medellin and Sanchez-Llamas (Lori Damrosch)

Two response essays

B. Review Essay — Customary International Law: Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain (John McGinnis)

Two response essays

C. Review Essay — International Law in Constitutional Interpretation: Roper, Lawrence and Atkins (Mark Tushnet)

Two response essays

D. Review Essay — International Law in Statutory Interpretation: Empagran (Ralf Michaels)

Two response essays

E. Review Essay — International Law and Enemy Combatants: Boumediene, Hamdan and Hamdi (David Golove)

Two response essays

VI. Conclusion

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Speaker Bios

Roger Alford
Pepperdine University School of Law

Prior to joining the faculty in 2000, Professor Alford served as a senior legal advisor with the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland, the tribunal established by the Volcker Commission to resolve claims to Holocaust-era dormant Swiss bank accounts. From 1995 to 1999, he was in private practice with Hogan & Hartson, Washington, D.C. He clerked for the Honorable James L. Buckley, U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia (1994-95), and the Honorable Richard C. Allison, Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, in The Hague, Netherlands (1992-94).

He is the founder and general editor of www.kluwerarbitration.com, a comprehensive online international arbitration portal. He has authored and edited a number of scholarly articles that have been published in the American Journal of International Law, UCLA Law Review, Ohio State Law Review, New York University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Michigan Law Review, International Lawyer, the Virginia Journal of International Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, and the Cornell International Law Journal. He has also co-edited a book on Holocaust Restitution published with New York University Press in 2006. The focus of his scholarship is foreign relations law, international commercial law, human rights law, arbitration, and international courts and tribunals.

He is a permanent contributor to the international law blog “Opinio Juris”. He has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, the Executive Committee of the Institute of Transnational Arbitration, and the Executive Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association.

Professor Alford has taught Contracts, Constitutional Law, International Law, Arbitration, International Alternative Dispute Resolution, International Trade, and International Litigation.

David J. Bederman
Emory University School of Law

David J. Bederman is K.H. Gyr Professor of Private International Law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. After having earned an undergraduate degree from Princeton University in international affairs, he went on to receive an M.Sc. in Marine Affairs at the London School of Economics. Professor Bederman read law at the University of Virginia, and, after graduating, clerked with the Hon. Charles E. Wiggins, Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Professor Bederman’s academic and professional career has focused on international law and its practical impact on American government. Aside from holding the Diploma of the Hague Academy of International Law, as well as a Ph.D. in Law from the University of London, he has also served as a Legal Advisor at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague. He is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law. After a stint in private practice with the Washington firm of Covington & Burling, he accepted his current teaching appointment at Emory.

‘As well as being a full-time teacher, Professor Bederman continues to represent clients on important constitutional and international law issues, including a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and significant international arbitrations. He has served as a litigation consultant to the U.S. Departments of Justice, State, Treasury and numerous federal agencies. Professor Bederman’s research interests also include legal theory and history, admiralty and maritime law, and federal practice and procedure.

Lori Damrosch
Columbia University School of Law

Lori Damrosch received her B.A. from Yale in 1973 and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1976. After law school she clerked for Judge Jon Newman. Damrosch served in the Office of the Legal Adviser, U.S. Department of State, from 1977 to 1980. Her responsibilities included European and Canadian affairs, international antitrust, aviation, and trade. She was the special assistant to the State Department Legal Adviser in 1980. She worked as an associate with Sullivan & Cromwell from 1981-84.

Professor Damrosch joined the Columbia faculty in 1984. Her publications include: The International Court of Justice at a Crossroads (ed., 1987); Law and Force in the New International Order (ed., 1991); Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts (ed., 1993); Beyond Confrontation: International Law for the Post-Cold War Era (ed. 1995); Enforcing International Law through Non-Forcible Measures (Hague Academy of International Law, 1997); and International Law: Cases and Materials (5th ed., with Henkin, Murphy and Smit, 2009).

Damrosch was a resident fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1995-96. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Department of State Advisory Committee on International Law, and numerous international law and human rights organizations. She was a lead organizer of the U.S.-Soviet (later U.S.-Russian) research project on international law for the American Society of International Law (A.S.I.L.). She served as Vice President of A.S.I.L. from 1996-98, and as a counselor of A.S.I.L. from 2001 to 2005. She has been a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law since 1990, and has served as co-editor-in-chief since 2003. Her principal areas of interest are public international law and the U.S. law of foreign relations.

William S. Dodge
U.C. Hastings College of the Law

William S. Dodge is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law and currently holds the Harry and Lillian Hastings Research Chair. He is the co-author with Detlev F. Vagts and Harold Hongju Koh of the casebook Transnational Business Problems (Foundation Press 4th ed. 2008) and has written extensively, among other topics, on the history of customary international law in American courts and on statutory interpretation in the international context. In 2004 he wrote the Amicus Brief of Professors of Federal Jurisdiction and Legal History in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, the position of which the Supreme Court adopted. Professor Dodge received his B.A. summa cum laude from Yale College in 1986 and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1991. After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court. He practiced law with Arnold & Porter in Washington D.C. before joining the UC Hastings faculty in 1995.

Martin Flaherty
Fordham University School of Law

Martin S. Flaherty is Leitner Family Professor of Law and Co-Founding Director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he was Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and a Visiting Professor at the New School in New York. Professor Flaherty has taught at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, and has recently founded the Rule of Law in Asia Program at the Leitner Center as well as co-founded the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers. He has also taught at Sungkyunkwan Univeristy in Seoul, Queen’s University Belfast, Cardozo School of Law, and the New School. Previously Professor Flaherty served as a law clerk for Justice Byron R. White of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge John Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Flaherty holds a B.A. summa cum laude from Princeton, an M.A. and M.Phil. from Yale (in history) and a J.D. from the Columbia Law School, where he was Book Review and Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review. Formerly chair of the New York City Bar Association’s International Human Rights Committee, he has led or participated in human rights missions to Northern Ireland, Turkey, Hong Kong, Mexico, Malaysia, Kenya, and Romania. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Flaherty’s publications focus upon constitutional law and history, foreign affairs, and international human rights and appear in such journals as the Columbia Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review.

David Golove
New York University School of Law

Professor David M. Golove specializes in the constitutional law of foreign affairs and has written extensively in the constitutional history pertaining to that field. He is best known for a book-length article published in the Michigan Law Review, “Treaty-Making and the Nation: The Historical Foundations of the Nationalist Conception of the Treaty Power.” In this article, Golove comprehensively considers a question of constitutional law that has been controversial from the moment of the nation’s birth in 1776 and remains so today. Can the United States government, through its power to make treaties, effectively regulate subjects that would otherwise be beyond the reach of Congress’s enumerated legislative powers? For example, a treaty prohibiting the death penalty? He answers yes, and in doing so has produced both a major work of legal historical scholarship and an important legal and constitutional defense of federal power.

In 1995, an article by Golove in the Harvard Law Review (co-authored with Bruce Ackerman) dealt with another fundamental issue in foreign relations law: the undeniable fact that many international accords today are approved not through the treaty processes mandated in the U.S. Constitution, but by majority votes of both houses. In a subsequent article published in the NYU Law Review, Golove challenges the distinguished constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, in a debate over the interpretation of the Treaty Clause which Golove defended in his Harvard Law Review article.

Golove received his B.A. from Berkeley in 1979 and has law degrees from Boalt Hall and Yale. He teaches in the fields of Constitutional Law and International Law. Professor Golove is a Co-Director of the NYU’s Center on Law and Security.

Duncan B. Hollis
Temple University School of Law

Professor Hollis’s scholarship focuses on issues of positivism and authority in international and foreign affairs law. Hollis uses treaties as the focal point for this research; he co-authored and co-edited National Treaty Law & Practice (2005), which analyzes how different nation states use their domestic law to regulate the negotiation, conclusion and implementation of treaties.& Beyond treaties, Professor Hollis researches the broader role agreements play in U.S. and international affairs, whether via political commitments, foreign compacts, or new rules for cyberwarfare. Professor Hollis’s work was cited repeatedly by the dissent in the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Medellin v. Texas, and he counseled the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on possible Senate responses to that decision.

Professor Hollis received his A.B., summa cum laude, from Bowdoin College. In 1996, he received a Masters in International Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a Juris Doctorate, summa cum laude, from Boston College Law School. From 1998-2004, Professor Hollis served as an attorney adviser in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. There, he spent several years as the attorney-adviser for treaty affairs, represented U.S. interests on international environmental law issues, and participated in the litigation of the Avena and Oil Platforms cases before the International Court of Justice. Since 2006, Professor Hollis has been a regular contributor to the international law blog, Opinio Juris.

Thomas H. Lee
Fordham University School of Law

Thomas H. Lee is the Leitner Family Professor of Law and Director of International Studies at Fordham University School of Law in New York, where he teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, federal courts, and international law. He is the author of many articles and of a forthcoming book on the international laws of war and the American Civil War. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was Articles Chair of the Harvard Law Review and winner of the Laylin Prize in International Law. He also holds an A.B. summa cum laude and an A.M. in East Asian Studies from Harvard, where he is a Ph.D. candidate in Government specializing in international relations theory. Prior to teaching, he served as a U.S. naval intelligence officer from 1991 to 1995, with four submarine deployments, and as a law clerk for Judge Michael Boudin of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for Associate Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught as a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul Korea.

John McGinnis
Northwestern University Law School

Professor John O. McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, He was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Professor McGinnis is a scholar in both the areas of constitutional and international law. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representatives has added him to the roster of Americans who can be appointed as panelists to resolve World Trade Organization disputes. He is a past winner of Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40.

Professor McGinnis has published articles in several leading law journals, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, Texas Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary.

Ralf Michaels
Duke University School of Law

Ralf Michaels is a Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. Professor Michaels joined the Duke Law School in 2002. Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and Private International Law in Hamburg and a Joseph Story Fellow at Harvard Law School. Since coming to Duke, he has held the Lloyd Cutler Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a distinguished visitor fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, and a visiting professorship at the Université Paris II. In 2009/10, he will be a Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Law and Public Affairs Program of Princeton University. Professor Michaels teaches and researches in the areas of comparative law, conflict of laws, and law and globalization. He is co-editor and author of several books and articles in these areas, published in the United States and in Europe; he has lectured in English, German and French in several different countries. Currently, he is engaged in two projects: a theory of US courts as world courts, and, together with Karen Knop (U of Toronto) and Annelise Riles (Cornell), conflict of laws as theory of global law. He and his wife have three daughters and too little time.

Edward A. Purcell, Jr.
New York Law School

Edward A. Purcell, Jr., is the Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor at New York Law School, where he teaches civil procedure, federal courts, complex litigation, and civil rights law. His most recent books are Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise: A Historical Inquiry (Yale, 2007) and Brandeis and the Progressive Constitution: Erie, the Judicial Power, and the Politics of the Federal Courts in Twentieth-Century America (Yale, 2000), which won the Order of the Coif’s Triennial Book Award and the Triennial Griswold Prize of the Supreme Court Historical Society. A Ph.D. in American intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin and the author of The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Kentucky, 1973), he received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1979 before joining Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City, where he practiced law and worked on what was to become his second book, Litigation and Inequality: Federal persity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958 (Oxford, 1992). He has served on the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History and the Community Law Office of The Legal Aid Society and is currently on the editorial board of Continuity and Change and the Academic Advisory Board of the Institute for Constitutional Studies at George Washington University Law School.

Michael D. Ramsey
University of San Diego School of Law

Michael D. Ramsey is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and International Law. He is the author of THE CONSTITUTION’S TEXT IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Harvard University Press 2007) and of numerous articles on foreign relations law in publications such as the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal and the American Journal of International Law. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and his J.D. summa cum laude from Stanford Law School. Prior to teaching, he served as a judicial clerk for Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, and practiced law with the law firm of Latham & Watkins, where he specialized in international finance and investment. He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Department of Political Science and at the University of Paris – Sorbonne, in the Department of Comparative Law.

David Sloss
Santa Clara Law

David Sloss is a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Global Law and Policy. He is the editor of The Role of Domestic Courts in Treaty Enforcement: A Comparative Study (forthcoming, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). He has published numerous articles on the history of U.S. foreign affairs law and the judicial enforcement of treaties in U.S. courts. Professor Sloss received his B.A. from Hampshire College, his M.P.P. from Harvard University and his J.D. from Stanford Law School. He taught for nine years at Saint Louis University School of Law. Before he was a law professor, he clerked for Judge Joseph T. Sneed of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked as an associate for Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. He also spent nine years in the federal government, where he worked on East-West arms control negotiations and nuclear proliferation issues.

Paul B. Stephan
University of Virginia School of Law

An expert on international business and Soviet and post-Soviet legal systems, Paul Stephan has advised governments and international organizations, organized conferences, edited books, and lectured to professionals, university groups, and high school students on a variety of issues raised by the globalization of the world economy and the transition away from Soviet-style socialism. During 2006-07 he served as counselor on international law in the U.S. Department of State. Other interests for Stephan, who joined the Law School faculty in 1979, include international law, taxation, and constitutional law.

In law school, Stephan was executive editor of the Virginia Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. During the two-year period between his graduation and return as a professor, he clerked for Judge Levin Campbell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stephan has worked on a variety of projects involving law reform in former socialist states. He has worked in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Albania, and Slovakia on behalf of the U.S. Treasury and in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan on behalf of the International Monetary Fund. He also has organized training programs for tax administrators and judges from all of the formerly socialist countries under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. His casebook on international business is used at law schools both in the United States and abroad. He has written extensively on international law, corruption, and the history of the Cold War.

Mark Tushnet
Harvard Law School

Professor Tushnet is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall. Professor Tushnet specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law. His research includes studies examining (skeptically) the practice of judicial review in the United States and around the world. He also writes in the area of legal and particularly constitutional history, with works on the development of civil rights law in the United States and (currently) a long-term project on the history of the Supreme Court in the 1930s. This fall he is organizing a conference on American constitutional development and another that features a conversation among several current and former judges on the world’s constitutional courts. Professor Tushnet has authored several books on U.S. constitutional law and comparative constitutional law.

Michael P. Van Alstine
University of Maryland School of Law

Professor Michael P. Van Alstine specializes in international and domestic private law. He has published widely in both English and German in the areas of contracts, commercial law, and international commercial transactions. His particular area of scholarly interest is the domestic law application of international law through the vehicle of treaties. Prior to joining the faculty in 2002, Professor Van Alstine spent seven years on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, during which he was a four-time recipient of the Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Van Alstine has earned law degrees in both the United States and Germany. He received both his Doctor of Laws and Masters of Comparative Law degrees summa cum laude from the University of Bonn, Germany. He obtained his Juris Doctor degree “with high honors” from the George Washington University. Before becoming a law professor, he also practiced domestic and international commercial and business law at law firms in the United States and Germany.

At the School of Law, Professor Van Alstine teaches International Business Transactions, Contracts, and Commercial Law. He was appointed Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development in 2006. The students at the School of Law chose him as Teacher of the Year in 2008.

Melissa Waters
Washington University Law School (St. Louis)

Professor Waters’ research and teaching interests include foreign relations law, international law, international human rights law and international criminal law, comparative law, conflicts of law, civil procedure, and complex civil litigation. Her scholarly work focuses on the incorporation of international law into domestic legal regimes, and in particular on the role of transnational judicial dialogue in developing international legal norms and in transforming U.S. and other domestic courts into key mediators between domestic and international law. She has written extensively on the debate in Congress and in the media over the use of foreign and international law in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Her articles have been published in the Columbia, Georgetown, and North Carolina law reviews, in the Yale Journal of International Law, and in numerous edited volumes and symposium collections. In 2006, her work was one of three U.S. entries selected by the American Society of International Law (through a peer reviewed process) for presentation at the inaugural Four Societies Symposium (a joint symposium of the American, Australia/New Zealand, Canadian, and Japanese Societies of International Law). Her scholarship on transnational judicial dialogue has been cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Prior to entering law teaching, Professor Waters served in the U.S. State Department as Senior Advisor to Harold Hongju Koh, Asisstant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor. She was a litigator at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where she was a member of President Clinton’s legal defense team. She has also served as a consultant to the Soros Foundation Open Society Institute, specializing in the design, development and implementation of rule of law and human rights capacity building projects.

John Fabian Witt
Yale Law School

John Fabian Witt ;is Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of widely acclaimed works on the history of American law, including Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2007), which explores law and nationhood at key moments in American history from the Founding to the Cold War, and the prizewinning book, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as articles in the Columbia Law Review, The Harvard Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, and other scholarly journals. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and The Washington Post. He is currently writing a book on the law of war in American history from the Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century. Professor Witt is a graduate of Yale Law School and Yale College and he holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale. Before returning to Yale, he was the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia University. He served as law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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Schedule

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2009

8:00 to 9:00 AM: Breakfast

9:00 to 10:00 AM: Panel One – 1789 – 1860

David Sloss, Michael Ramsey, Bill Dodge
15 minute presentation; 45 minutes for discussion and Q&A

10:00 – 10:30 AM: Coffee Break

10:30 AM to 12:15 PM: Panel Two – 1860 to 1900

John Fabian Witt – Historical Commentary
Duncan Hollis – Treaties
David Bederman – Customary International Law
Thomas Lee – International Law and Interpretation
Michael Ramsey – Moderator

12 minutes for each panelist; 55 minutes for discussion and Q&A

12:15 to 1:30 PM: Lunch

1:30 to 3:15 PM: Panel Three – 1900 to 1945

Edward Purcell – Historical Commentary
Michael Van Alstine – Treaties
Michael Ramsey – Customary International Law
Roger Alford – International Law and Interpretation
William Dodge – Moderator

12 minutes for each panelist; 55 minutes for discussion and Q&A

3:15 – 3:45 PM: Coffee Break

3:45 to 5:30 PM: Panel Four – 1945-2000

Martin Flaherty – Historical Commentary
Paul Stephan – Treaties
William Dodge – Customary International Law
Melissa Waters – International Law and Interpretation
David Sloss – Moderator

12 minutes for each panelist; 55 minutes for discussion and Q&A

5:30 to 7:00 PM: Cocktail Reception

7:00 to 9:00 PM: Dinner

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2009

8:00 – 8:30 AM: Breakfast

8:30 to 9:40 AM: Panel Five – Treaties: Medellin and Sanchez-Llamas

Author – Lori Damrosch (12 mins)
Commentator – Paul Stephan (8 mins)
Commentator – Duncan Hollis (8 mins)
Moderator – David Sloss