1 Chi J Intl L 327
Jack Goldsmith

The human rights community has fiercely criticized the United States' failure to make international human rights treaties a source of law in the domestic realm. In this essay, I defend US practice against these criticisms. To focus the analysis, I simplify in two ways. First, I consider only the ICCPR, the most ambitious of the international human rights treaties. Second, I assume that the US practice of not incorporating the ICCPR into the domestic realm is legally valid under both international law and domestic constitutional law. I thus concentrate only on the policy question whether the US should apply the ICCPR in the domestic realm.