Ulf Linderfalk (Lund University Faculty of Law) has posted Legal Communication, Good Faith and the Law of Treaties on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This article is concerned with the conditions for the communication of international law. It focuses all attention to the understanding of those utterances and non-verbal acts of communication, which originate in an international ‘lawmaker’—a subject or group of subjects vested with the power to create, modify and extinguish legal relationships. The understanding of an international lawmaker’s act is subject to the constraints encapsulated by the principle of good faith. As this article argues, the principle of good faith entitles addressees to understand international lawmakers to be communicating according to standards. It imposes on anyone coming within the scope of application of a rule to apply it so as to not render its object and purpose ineffective. Section 2 of this article lays out the details of this theory, including the inferential evidence on which it is based. Section 3 illustrates the usefulness of the theory by tracking the significance of the principle of good faith for the understanding of the law laid down in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Section 4, finally, discusses the outcomes of Section 3 in terms of their contribution to international legal research generally. As argued: (i) they help to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the law of treaties; (ii) they help to understand the importance and wide scope of application of the principle of good faith; (iii) they help to understand the common characterization of the principle as one of fundamental importance.
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