Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2015 Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties Sarah H. Cleveland Columbia Law School,
[email protected] William S. Dodge Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, International Law Commons, and the Military, War, and Peace Commons Recommended Citation Sarah H. Cleveland & William S. Dodge, Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties, 124 YALE L. J. 2202 (2015). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/235 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. TH AL LAW JOURAL SARAH H. CLEVELAND & WILLIAM S. DODGE Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties ABSTRACT. One of the principal aims of the U.S. Constitution was to give the federal gov- ernment authority to comply with its international legal commitments. The scope of Congress's constitutional authority to implement treaties has recently received particular attention. In Bond v. United States, the Court avoided the constitutional questions by construing a statute to respect federalism, but these questions are unlikely to go away. This Article contributes to the ongoing debate by identifying the Offenses Clause as an additional source of Congress's constitutional authority to implement certain treaty commitments. Past scholarship has assumed that the Arti- cle I power to "define and punish... Offences against the Law of Nations" is limited to custom- ary international law.