Treaties and law

I have changed the thread subject because I want just to put 
a short comment on the general point. Thank you dej for 
bringing  it to notice. [And apologies for a lot of typos in 
recent posts.]

From: "Mary E Tyler"
> Incidentally, in regards to something Joseph Harris said 
> about US
> copyright law and international treaties (which I can't 
> find to reply
> to directly at present but was in this thread), I thought 
> this article
> was interesting:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/politics/11judge.html
>
> The article is about SCotUS nominee Sotomayor, but the 
> last half of
> the article deals with the legal binding-ness of 
> international treaty.
> I thought it would be illuminating to those who are 
> interested.
>
> dej
>

I would say that it seems right that treaties have a strange 
half-life in law. To an extent it depends how they have been 
agreed to, but that the nation's legislature should give the 
interpretation in new law seems to me necessary to at least 
take account of national differences in legal systems.

Judges must be highly observant of laws of the land, even if 
they also take the changing moods of interpretation into 
account, and the nature of the nation's obligations, such as 
treaties. They also - in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition - 
have to handle conflicts between common and statute law.

Whether a treaty is observed or not is a political matter 
but, as I was indicating before, failure to legislate can 
leave the respective country isolated on the matter - and 
ultimately at a disadvantage in a number of ways. The reason 
this applies strongly to IP is that there is not only the 
near universal acceptance of Berne, but an office of the UN 
dedicated to fair treatment over ownership of intellectual 
property and commercial use [WIPO].

Joseph Harris




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