President's pages.

• Author: Horwich, Benjamin

This issue features the articles emerging from the Review's annual Symposium, which focused this year on Treaties, Enforcement, and U.S. Sovereignty. The live event took place at Stanford Law School on February 21 and 22, 2003. The Symposium program and audio of the keynote address and panels are available at the Review's website, http://lawreview.stanford.edu.

The United States currently faces an international community increasingly characterized by a proliferation of treaties, yet continues to assert a unilateral position on many issues, as exemplified most recently by its stance on Iraq. This "exceptionalism," to borrow Professor Harold Koh's term, is shaped partly by domestic constraints on treaties, including constitutional obligations related to ratification, and the possibility that the U.S. Constitution may create substantive limitations on the content of treaties and treaty provisions. It derives also from political resistance to restricting U.S. sovereignty, bodied forth in the rhetoric against the International Criminal Court and the treaties underpinning international institutions. Irrespective of its source, such U.S. practice in the international arena raises several questions. One concerns the philosophical justifications, for entering into treaties, particularly in the context of globalization, and for adhering to them strictly, "unsigning" them, or asserting exceptions to their enforcement. Another asks how effective treaties are in practice, whether there are areas in which they do not represent an appropriate method of regulating, and if alternatives to a regime of treaties exist.

These and related inquiries provided the wellspring for the collection of articles in this Issue. The authors present a diversity of perspectives derived not only from political differences, but also from the disparities between government and academia and between domestic and international vantage points. Many of the pieces are likewise inflected with an interdisciplinary accent, drawing on history, literature, philosophy, feminist theory, sociology, and political science.

The Symposium began on Friday, February 21, with a panel on "Delegation and International Institutions," moderated by Stanford Law School's Dean Kathleen Sullivan, and featuring David Golove of NYU Law School; Curtis Bradley of the University of Virginia Law School; and Ed Swaine from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Harold Koh of Yale Law School then...