{"id":518267,"date":"2010-04-06T07:52:15","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T11:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opiniojuris.org\/?p=11826"},"modified":"2010-04-06T07:52:15","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T11:52:15","slug":"if-only-self-executing-meant-what-it-sounds-like-it-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/518267","title":{"rendered":"If only self-executing meant what it sounds like it means . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>by Duncan Hollis <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I figure it&#8217;s never too late to catch up on some of last week&#8217;s April 1 reporting.\u00a0 The <a  href=\"http:\/\/www.hlrecord.org\/news\/lawmaker-self-executing-didn-t-mean-what-i-thought-1.1293319\">Harvard Law Record <\/a>got a great &#8220;scoop&#8221; with this story:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Speaking to a lunch seminar held by the National Security Law Association, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was shocked to discover that the term \u201cself-executing\u201d did not exactly mean what he had imagined when he voted for a new arms reduction treaty with Russia earlier this year.<\/p>\n<p>Inhofe, a Republican, approved the treaty on the belief that the \u201cself-executing\u201d language had been sneakily inserted by members of his party in order to make the law ineffective upon passage.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWait, what?\u201d the 75 year old lawmaker, who has served in the Senate for 16 years, exclaimed. \u201cI literally thought \u2018self-executing\u2019 mean that the law would be dead on arrival. Well, this is embarrassing,\u201d he admitted to the audience, which consisted primarily of law students and a reasonable number of Cambridge hobos, many of whom were the most amused at Inhofe\u2019s error.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI mean, this is pretty much foreign relations law 101,\u201d said Jack McGrinty, a begging fixture in Harvard Square. \u201cI bet he doesn\u2019t even know the Senate has ultimate treaty-making authority. Well, at least this chump\u2019s ignorance at least means that we now live in a safer world, for once\u201d. He later added, \u201cspare some change?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>All joking aside, I wonder how many U.S. Senators actually know what it means for a treaty to be non self executing\u00a0 (or what criteria\u00a0identify such treaties)? \u00a0They do have the advice and consent power after all.\u00a0 On the other hand, a uniform definition may be pretty hard to come by when academics can&#8217;t even agree on a single definition, or <a  href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/pss\/20456642\">two<\/a>, or <a  href=\"http:\/\/www.asil.org\/files\/TreatiesTaskForceReport.pdf\">three<\/a>, or <a  href=\"http:\/\/www.questia.com\/googleScholar.qst?docId=79265924\">four<\/a>, or . . . well you get the idea.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/opiniojurisfeed\/~4\/RQvhRudYiEk\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Duncan Hollis I figure it&#8217;s never too late to catch up on some of last week&#8217;s April 1 reporting.\u00a0 The Harvard Law Record got a great &#8220;scoop&#8221; with this story: Speaking to a lunch seminar held by the National Security Law Association, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4226,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4226"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}