John T. Parry (Lewis & Clark College – Law School) has posted Sanchez-Llamas in Context (Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 11, 2007) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This essay is the introduction to a Lewis & Clark Law Review symposium on the Supreme Court’s decision last term in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, which concerned the rights under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of foreign nationals arrested in the United States. It also raised federalism questions about the manner in which state courts should interact with public international law, as well as whether or how the Supreme Court should mandate state court engagement or compliance with international law. Further, because the debate over Article 36 turns in part on whether prisoners have enforceable rights under the VCCR, the case required the Court to consider the relationship among a host of overlapping issues concerning the domestic status of public international law and the role of federal courts in ensuring that status, whatever it may be.
Finally, Sanchez-Llamas marked the Court’s fourth encounter with the VCCR in less than a decade. During the same period the International Court of Justice has issued three decisions about U.S. non-compliance with the VCCR. One of the critical issues in Sanchez-Llamas was how the Supreme Court would react to the ICJ decisions, a reaction that has broader implications for the relationship between U.S. courts and the proliferating number of international courts.
Although Sanchez-Llamas takes a large step toward resolving the questions raised by individual claims under Article 36, it does not end the debate over the meaning and application of that provision. Not surprisingly, the decision also fails to provide definitive answers to the larger questions that hovered around the litigation. The essays in this symposium address many of these questions by analyzing the Sanchez-Llamas opinions, teasing out the implications of the decision, and identifying issues that remain unresolved (and, of course, suggesting resolutions).
This essay briefly describes the history of Article 36 litigation, notes the ways in which the VCCR interacted with the state court proceedings below, and discusses the Sanchez-Llamas opinions. The entire symposium, with contributions by Julian Ku, Janet Levit, Margaret McGuinness, Paul Stephan, and Melissa Waters, is available at the Lewis & Clark Law Review web site.