LAW4512E - United States foreign relations law

Leader(s): Judd Epstein and Douglas J. Sylvester

Offered

Not offered in 2009

Synopsis

This unit provides students with an introduction to the complex and multifaceted relationship between United States domestic law, international law, and foreign relations policy choices. Students will be exposed to aspects of United States Constitutional law, judicial decisions, statutes, treaties, charters of international organizations, and various pragmatic doctrines that shape United States attitudes toward law and foreign relations. Among the topics that students will explore are United States-specific approaches to the laws of war, treaties, customary international law, regulation of commerce, sovereign immunity, and the specific and idiosyncratic limitations imposed on United States foreign relations law by federalism.
In addition to these broader themes, students should leave the course with a better understanding of the legal issues that shape United States foreign policy. In so doing, we will explore such current topics as the war on terror, globalization and trade, human rights, dispute settlement, and human rights.

Objectives

1. To provide non-United States law and graduate students with a broader perspective on the evolution, current status, and doctrines underlying US legal policy towards international law.
2. To examine critically US policy towards incorporation of international legal norms in domestic law.
3. To engage students in close examination of constitutional, precedential, doctrinal, and statutory sources that define United States Foreign Relations Law.

Assessment

90% final examination (open book) - 2 hrs 30 minutes plus 30 minutes reading and noting time; 10% class participation.

Contact hours

The 36 hours of classes will be conducted in intensive lectures and student interaction in 9 hours of classtime per week for 4 weeks.