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National Treaty Law and Practice. Edited by Duncan B. Hollis, Merritt R. Blakeslee, and L. Benjamin Ederington. Leiden, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2005. Pp. xv, 837. Index. $279, euro195.
Developments of International Law in Treaty Making. Edited by Rûdiger Wolfram and Volker Röben. Berlin, New York: Springer, 2005. Pp. viii, 632. $129.
Both National Treaty Law and Practice, edited by Duncan B. Hollis, Merritt R. Blakeslee, and L. Benjamin Ederington, and Developments of International Law in Treaty Making, edited by Rüdiger Wolfram and Volker Röben, are big books and said to be about treaties. Each of their chapters is written by a different hand, which can be rather unsatisfactory. However good the editing, some chapters may stray from the subject of the work; inevitably, the quality of the contributions will vary. Of the large number of books on international law published each year, I am one of those who prefer monographs-where it is pretty clear from the first chapter whether it is worth reading on. That said, the shared format does work well for National Treaty Law and Practice, the subject necessarily calling for a different author for each chapter.
National Treaty Law and Practice is rightly dedicated to the memory of Monroe Leigh, being a consolidation of the three volumes under the same title that he edited with Merritt Blakeslee and Benjamin Ederington, and were published by the American Society of International Law in 1995, 1999, and 2003. The entries have been updated to take account of the inevitable changes in law and practice. But there is also a new 53-page opening chapter by Hollis, "A Comparative Approach to Treaty Law and Practice." I have not yet been able to find a review of any of the original volumes. The content may have been thought not to be of sufficient interest for a learned journal. But an evaluation of the updated volume and the new chapter is timely. We can now see the whole work as in a single volume, and interest in the relationship between international and domestic law has revived.1
As Hollis righdy says, treaties are now the dominant source of international law. They often require implementation by both the executive and legislature. How national laws deal with this process of implementation should...