Paparinskis, Martins --- "Regulating treaties: A comparative perspective" [2014] ELECD 738; in Tams, J. Christian; Tzanakopoulos, Antonios; Zimmermann, Andreas (eds), "Research Handbook on the Law of Treaties" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014) 39

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Law of Treaties

Editor(s): Tams, J. Christian; Tzanakopoulos, Antonios; Zimmermann, Andreas

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857934772

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Regulating treaties: A comparative perspective

Author(s): Paparinskis, Martins

Number of pages: 35

Abstract/Description:

Legal concepts of domestic law profoundly influence the way one approaches and conceptualizes international law. James Crawford has observed that ‘it cannot be said too often that our thinking about law is infiltrated, marinated, drenched with the influence of national legal systems, with their characteristic ways of enforcing obligations and vindicating rights. We were all national lawyers first’. That is surely right (although the trend towards specialization that erodes the authority of generalists might also eventually expunge the memory of the domestic origins of the invisible college). The domestic law perspective applies with particular force to international treaties that combine a consensual form, prima facie reminiscent of the structure employed in the domestic law of contracts, with a substantive breadth, prima facie extending beyond the legal relationships that would be addressed by the law of contracts in domestic law. This chapter will attempt to explore the tension between underlying assumptions about the appropriateness of domestic analogies.