Medellin v. Texas

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Authorship: This page is maintained by Lyle Denniston.

Contents

[edit] Briefs and Documents

Docket: 06-984

Oral Argument: Transcript

Judgment: AFFIRMED in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts.

All of the filings in this case can be found here.

[edit] Pre-Argument Articles

[edit] Argument Preview

By Lyle Denniston

In Medellin v. Texas, the Supreme Court is taking a second look at the obligation – or lack of it -- of American states to obey a judgment of the World Court on the legal rights of foreign nationals arrested and prosecuted for crimes in those states.

[edit] Background

The modern Supreme Court finds itself in a global village of law. That simple fact of transnational coexistence contributes to an intense struggle among the Justices over whether foreign sources of law should influence law in America – in particular, whether the meaning of the U.S. Constitution should be informed by notions of law that have found expression abroad. Within the Supreme Court, the controversy has arisen most acutely in constitutional decision-making on high-visibility issues such as the death penalty for juveniles and sexual privacy for homosexual adults. In Medellin v. Texas, the dispute recurs in a decidedly different environment: within a grand contest over Presidential power, separation of constitutional powers at the national level, states rights and federalism, treaties as “the law of the land” in the U.S., and the legal rights of some of the least visible people in American society – foreign nationals with few ties to the U.S. and few resources who commit crimes and thus put themselves into the U.S. criminal justice system, especially at the state level. Curiously, it also involves an effort by President Bush to vigorously champion Executive authority in enforcing domestically a treaty that he has otherwise chosen to treat as an unenforceable nullity inside the U.S.. And it raises a question of whether the Supreme Court has already settled the issues in this case in a ruling it issued in June 2006 (Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, 04-10566).

The treaty at issue is the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, adopted in 1963 and now joined by 171 nations, including the United States; the U.S. was a prime architect of the treaty. A separate Optional Protocol, embraced by 46 of those 171 nations, requires governments to accept the role of the World Court (the International Court of Justice at The Hague) in deciding disputes under the Vienna Convention. President Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Optional Protocol as the Medellin case unfolded in U.S. courts, but wants it enforced in that case and those involving 50 other Mexican nationals who won a case in the World Court on their treaty rights.

Under the Convention’s Article 36, a foreign national who is detained by a government that consents to the treaty must be told without delay that he has a right to contact a diplomat – a consular officer -- from his or her home country. “While the United States has vigorously insisted on strict compliance with [the Convention] when Americans have been detained overseas, compliance in the United States has been poor,” according to one of the filings in the Medellin case.

One foreign national who was never told of his rights of consular access until after he had been charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to death in Texas was Jose Ernesto Medellin. Now 33 years old, he was convicted in the strangling murder and gang rape of two teenage girls in Houston in June 1993. The government of Mexico, prompted in part by a World Court ruling in 2001 in another case involving denial of consular rights to foreign nationals in the U.S., filed a new case in the World Court on behalf of Medellin and 50 other Mexican nationals denied Convention rights. Mexico won a decision by that tribunal in 2004, a decision that declared again that a U.S. state cannot forbid a foreign national from asserting a consular access claim even though the claim had not been raised at trial or on appeal. The World Court said the United States government had a duty to review and reconsider the foreign nationals’ convictions and sentences.

Two months after the World Court ruling, the Fifth Circuit Court, in an already pending case, refused to allow Medellin to appeal a District Court’s dismissal of his habeas challenge that also was based on the Convention violation. The case then moved on to the Supreme Court, in the first of two appeals. In “Medellin I,” his lawyers asked the Court to rule that federal courts in the U.S. were bound by the World Court ruling, either as a matter of international law or as a way to achieve uniform enforcing of treaties.

A month before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear oral argument in the case, The Bush Administration joined in the case as an amicus, urging the Court to rule that Medellin had no private right to seek enforcement of the Convention. Simultaneously with that filing in the Court, President Bush announced that the U.S. government would comply with the World Court decision, and directed state courts to reexamine the Convention claims of Medellin and the 50 other Mexican nationals. Relying on that presidential action, Medellin’s lawyers filed a new post-conviction challenge under state law in Texas courts. That maneuver, along with President Bush’s decision, led the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision to dismiss Medellin’s appeal and allow the state habeas case to go forward, noting that the case could later come back to the Justices after the state courts had acted.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued its decision on Nov. 15, 2006. The state court found that the President did not have the constitutional authority to tell state courts to apply a decision of the World Court The state court also dismissed Medellin’s habeas petition, saying he had defaulted by failing to raise the issue at his trial. The U.S. government had participated in the case in state court to defend President Bush’s decision to have the World Court ruling obeyed in state courts.

[edit] Petition for Certiorari

Medellin’s new petition, filed on Jan. 16, 2007, again asked the Supreme Court to decide two questions. In “Medellin II,” the first question focused directly on whether the President had the authority to require states to obey the World Court ruling in order to satisfy U.S. treaty obligations. A second question again asked whether American courts – this time, state courts – were bound to obey the World Court ruling in the Mexican nationals’ case. This time, the second question was treated as a matter of federal supremacy under the Constitution, so the petition suggested that, even without the President’s action, state courts had to obey the international tribunal’s view of U.S. treaty obligations.

Once again, the Justice Department joined in the case as an amicus, urging the Court to grant review of Medellin’s new appeal. This time, the government supported Medellin’s claim – but only on the issue of Presidential authority. Absent the President’s intervention to enforce the World Court ruling, the Department argued, Medellin did not have a private right to enforce the Vienna Convention. It interpreted Medellin’s second question as including the question of private enforcement, although the question itself focused only on the duty of state courts to obey the World Court ruling under federal supremacy doctrine. While the Department disagreed with Medellin on its reading of his second question, it said it did not oppose review on that question, too, because it was one that the Court had agreed to hear in “Medellin I.” The government of Mexico also urged the Court to hear the case.

The Justices agreed on April 30, 2007, to grant review of both questions raised in the petition. Oral argument has been set for Wed., Oct. 10, 2007, at 10 a.m. – the only case scheduled for argument that day.

[edit] Merits Briefs

Medellin’s briefs on the merits provided a sturdy defense of Presidential power, arguing that President Bush actually had engaged in only a “modest exercise of his foreign affairs authority.” In deciding to “give effect” to the World Court judgment in the Mexican nationals’ case, it said, “the President entered no new international agreements, prescribed no new rules, established n new procedures, and undertook no new obligations. Instead, he merely confirmed that the United States would comply with international commitments already made by the constitutionally designated political actors, and would do so through the post-conviction review procedures already provided by state law.”

A significant early point in the brief is that the Supreme Court has not already decided the substance of “Medellin II” by its ruling in Sanchez-Llamas v.Oregon (decided June 28, 2006). There, the Court, dealing with the Vienna Convention claims of another Mexican national and a Honduran national, ruled by a 5-4 vote that states could apply their procedural default rules to claims of violations of the treaty – in other words, bar those claims in habeas if they had not been raised at the trial. The Court, in fact, said it had decided that issue in a summary ruling in 1998, Breard v. Greene. But, in discussing the World Court’s ruling in the case involving Medellin and others, the Court said only that the World Court’s interpretation of the Convention was not binding on American courts. It thus did not decide, according to Medellin’s merits brief, the separate question of whether U.S. courts are bound by a specific judgment issued by the World Court, as distinct from the reasoning of a World Court opinion. The brief contended: “Although this Court has held that the [World Court’s] reasoning has no binding precedential effect in future cases, it is undisputed that, by treaty, its judgments are binding in the particular cases they resolve.” Since treaties are the “supreme Law of the Land” under the Constitution, the obligation to obey the World Court judgment applies to Texas courts, according to the brief.

In defending Presidential power, the Medellin brief argued that President Bush was acting as the “zenith” of his constitutional authority, because he was acting with the support of Congress – the 1969 Senate ratification of the Vienna Convention. Moreover, it asserted that the President was exercising a power that is directly keyed to his constitutional authority in foreign affairs. “The President has done nothing more than determine that the United States will do what the elected representatives of the American people, by the treatymaking process prescribed by the Constitution, have already promised: to abide by a judgment of the [World Court]in a case to which the United States was a party.”

But, even if there were no support from Congress, the brief contended, the Supreme Court has previously recognized that the President has authority to resolve disputes with foreign powers. It was not necessary, it added, that the President do so in this instance through an executive agreement with Mexico – as the Texas state court said he would have to have done to overcome Texas criminal procedure law.

The state of Texas’ brief on the merits chose to treaty the case largely as one of “separation of powers.” The case, the brief said in its opening, “implicates every axis of the structural limitations on government: President vis-à-vis Congress, President vis-à-vis the Supreme Court, international law vis-à-vis domestic law, federal government vis-à-vis the States, and, with a Mobius twist, President vis-à-vis the state judiciary.”

In arguing that the President’s action is at the “lowest ebb,” not the highest tide, of Executive authority, Texas contended that the President had contradicted Congress by seeking to make the Vienna Convention enforceable not solely through diplomatic efforts not through domestic courts. The President also ran counter to Congress’ wishes, the brief said, because it operated on the assumption that the treaty created individual rights, not merely rights of governments vis-à-vis governments.

In arguing that the President intrudes on the power of the Courts, Texas relied upon the Sanchez-Llamas decision of 2006, interpreting that ruling as a rejection of any binding effect of World Court decisions in U.S. courts. Summoning up Marbury v. Madison, the state argued: “It is emphatically not the province of the President to say what federal treaty law is,” nor how the World Court ruling of the Vienna Convention should be interpreted.

In a fervent defense of states’ rights and federalism principles, Texas contended that President Bush’s action interfered directly with state sovereignty, by seeking to “expand the jurisdiction of the state courts, beyond what state law allows, and to commandeer state judges into service of the federal Executive. Our Federalism allows no such dictates.” Among other amici supporting Texas, 28 sister states join in arguing against the President’s action.

One of the more unusual amicus briefs was filed on behalf of a Texas couple, Randy and Sandra Ertman. They are the parents of Jennifer Ertman, who was one of the Houston teen-agers murdered in the gang crime for which Medellin was convicted and sentenced to death. In their brief, filed by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, they challenge Medellin on what their argument says is an “implicit third question” – whether Texas’ ban on repeated habeas challenges contradicts the World Court ruling. Medellin, it contended, had already had one opportunity to claim prejudice in his case from the Vienna Convention violation, and lost on that, so he is not entitled to make a second challenge. “Delaying the already long-overdue execution of this well-deserved sentence and of sentences in similar cases would be contrary to the rights of victims of crime and the law abiding public…,” the brief said.

The Justice Department’s amicus brief partially supporting Medellin attempted, as does the Medellin merits brief, to portray President Bush’s actions as minimal in scope. All that the Chief Executive has done, the government brief asserted, is to provide for “the enforcement of a judgment as to 51 specific individuals – a judgment with which the United States is obligated by treaty to comply. The law of judgments has long held that a domestic court may recognize a decision as binding, without adopting – indeed, while disagreeing with – its legal reasoning. The President’s action is of the same character.”

The Justice Department, like Medellin, invoked the concept that the President was using his highest level of power because he had Congress’ concurrence, implementing the obligations of a Senate-ratified treaty, and using his own inherent constitutional authority over foreign affairs. The President, it said, “is uniquely qualified to make the prompt and sensitive determinations involved” in foreign policy.

There is no conflict with the Sanchez-Llamas decision of 2006, the Department contended, because that was only an interpretation – albeit an authoritative one – of the Vienna Convention’s meaning and scope. There also was no “uindue” intrusion into matters reserve for the states, the Department argued, because the Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause” makes national government action binding on the states “when it acts under a valid treaty.” But, at most, the intrusion on state authority was “relatively modest,” it said, because it only requires states to take a new look at the Vienna Convention claims, and they are not commanded to reach a particular outcome.

[edit] Analysis

The Supreme Court’s record in Vienna Convention claims is not one that encourages foreign nationals charged with crimes in the U.S. to anticipate victory when going to Court to challenge a denial of consular access. Since a summary ruling in 1998 in Breard v. Greene, allowing states to enforce procedural default rules against post-trial Convention claims (a ruling that came before the World Court decisions that are now in dispute), the Court’s most significant action may well have been its ruling in the Sanchez-Llamas case on June 28, 2006, with the two new Justices taking part.

A clear five-Justice majority, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and including new Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., took much of the force out of the Vienna Convention – absent diplomatic efforts on behalf of foreign nationals denied their consular rights, or absent a new World Court judgment on behalf of other foreign nationals in the future. While that decision left open the question of who could enforce actual World Court judgment, those five might be inclined to support Medellin’s claim now only if persuaded by the Bush Administration’s Executive authority argument. A narrow opinion, minimizing what the President has done and relying on the law of judgments, might well attract their support. However, pulling in the other direction for at least some if not all of those five are the energetic claims of a clear majority of the states about compromised sovereignty. (The others in the majority were Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.)

The other four Justices – Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens – are already on record, in the 2006 case, in favor of allowing foreign nationals to bring claims at trial or in state post-conviction challenges that their Convention rights were violated. So, even without addressing the question of Presidential authority to call for state court action under a World Court ruling, they would appear to favor Medellin’s right to bring a challenge. It is unclear to whom they might turn for a fifth vote for that outcome, if the states’ rights claim appeals to the other five.

Assuming, though, that the Court does allow Medellin’s case to proceed, on whatever rationale, a difficult question would be the definition of just what state courts are to do under the “review and reconsideration” that the World Court mandated and that the President has insisted they provide. Can such a definition be drawn narrowly enough that it would not appear to “commandeer” state courts into federal service in enforcing their criminal laws?

[edit] Oral Argument Recap

This section is taken from an entry by Lyle Denniston that originally appeared on SCOTUSblog.

The Supreme Court, deeply fascinated with its own role in an interconnected world legal order, spent extra time on Wednesday examining the question of how to say no to the President on a treaty matter and, if it does, to do so without harming the Chief Executive’s power to speak for the nation in the global community. It was apparent that, if the case of Medellin v. Texas (06-984) had come to the Court without presidential involvement, it would have been easy to decide — in fact, the issue in that context may already have been effectively decided last year. But President Bush put his authority at the very center of it, and heavy complications have followed. The Justices’ keen interest in those complications led Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., to let the scheduled one-hour hearing Wednesday run on for an added 26 minutes — an especially rare gesture.

With cross-currents of constitutional and international law flowing freely, what appeared to be a majority of the Justices looked askance at a Presidential memo in February 2005, directing nine U.S. states to give 51 Mexican nationals convicted of crimes in those states a new chance to test their rights under an international treaty, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. What was troubling those Justices the most, it seemed, was that the President had sought to make binding a ruling by the World Court that would otherwise not have controlling effect on states’ ciminal procedures. That was worrisome for two reasons: it might intrude on the Court’s role to say what the legal meaning and effect of treaties is, and it might empower the World Court, in effect, to dictate the substance of American law.

This is not a Court (with a couple of exceptions among its members) that is genuinely fond of drawing meaning for American law from foreign sources. That skepticism found new expression in the Medellin case as several of the Justices looked at the World Court as a foreign entity that, through the President’s intervention, was intruding into domestic law — perhaps even at the expense of the Supreme Court’s power to say what the law is. Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, said he saw a constitutional problem with “giving an international body the authority to determine U.S. federal law. I am rather jealous of that authority. I don’t know on what basis we allow an international court to decide the content of American law.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., said the effect of the Bush Administration’s defense of the presidential order that states obey a World Court ruling would be that “the President can take any treaty that is not self-executing and make it binding under federal law.” Solicitor General Paul D. Clement tried, without notable success, to deflect such suggestions. All that President Bush had done in the Mexican nationals’ case, Clement contended, was to make a decision that, for foreign policy reasons, America would comply with the World Court decision to give the Mexicans another review of their cases in state court.

Donald F. Donovan, a New York City attorney representing Mexican national Jose Ernesto Medellin, sought to keep the case within a narrow focus. He argued that all that was at issue was a U.S. obligation under treaties it had signed and embraced to comply with a final ruling of the World Court on remedies for a violation of access to consular officers for accused aliens. President Bush had acted only to meet that obligation, Donovan argued in a refrain repeatedly stated. But he encountered a flurry of hypothetical reasons over broader implications, with the Chief Justice pursuing hypotheticals to test what power would be left to the Supreme Court if the World Court could be made the instrument for declaring American law. If the World Court’s judgment on the Mexican nationals’ legal rights here were binding federal law inside the U.S., Roberts wondered, would the Justices have any authority to second-guess the content of that law? “We would have no authority to review the judgment itself?” he asked with notable skepticism.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy also seem puzzled whether the Supreme Court could interpret the scope of a World Court ruling if it were ambiguous in any significant way. And Kennedy twice raised concerns about whether the President could “displace the authority” of the Court to interpret judgments of the World Court. Both Kennedy and Roberts were told, in response, by Donovan that a court ruling to enforce the World Court judgment would by itself constitute the application of federal law — here, the federal law of carrying out an obligation undertaken by treaty. The World Court ruling itself, the attorney said, is federal law — binding on the states by virtue of the Supremacy Clause, and also binding because the President had concluded through his Article II power to it was in the nation’s interest to comply with the World Court judgment.

The hearing did highlight a difference between Medellin’s lawyer and Clement, even though they are on the same side. Clement stressed that the government did not support Medellin’s argument that, without the President’s action, the World Court decision would be binding on the state courts in the U.S. “The President’s role is critically important,” the Solicitor General argued. When Justice Kennedy asked about the effect had the President decided not to comply with the World Court decision, Clement responded: “We would be on the other side.” Clement added that “we don’t think this judgment is enforceable on its own terms.”

Two members of the Court who often talk of the value of looking to foreign law for guidance, Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, were clearly the most willing on Wednesday to show support for the World Court’s authority and the duty of the U.S. to fulfill its promise of obeying World Court judgments in interpreting the Vienna Convention. Thus, they were the most energetic questioners of Texas’ state Solicitor General, R. Ted Cruz.

Justice Breyer sought Cruz’s response to a simple “chain of logic,” going from the language of the Constitution making treaties “the law of the land,” the U.S. agreement to the Vienna Convention and its agreement to abide by World Court rulings applying that treaty, and then to the requirement of the World Court that states take full account of the Convention’s strictures. Cruz said that Texas did not dispute that treaties were the law of the land, but said that what was at stake here was the action of the President in seeking to make the World Court judgment binding on the states in contradiction to their own laws. The Convention, he said, is not a self-executing treaty, and the President cannot make it so on his own.

Justice Ginsburg repeatedly returned to the basic theme that the U.S. had promised to abide by the World Court’s application of the Vienna Convention. This country, she said, had “accepted the authority of this tribunal, and to be bound to follow its decisions.”

Among the Justices, only David H. Souter spent some time exploring whether the Court could avoid a decision that would reject the President’s authority to implement the World Court judgment by simply ruling, on its own, that the international tribunal’s decision on the Mexican nationals was binding. Questioning Cruz, for example, Souter wondered whether there was any “positive rule, in international or domestic law, which precludes this Court from being the implementing authority” of a World Court decision? The state’s lawyer replied that the Court was “the final authority to determine federal law,” but said that, if it were to do so in the Medellin case, it would have to overrule its ruling of a year ago in the case of Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon finding that the Vienna Convention does not give foreign nationals a right to claim violation of their Convention rights if such claims are barred by state criminal procedures.

Medellin’s lawyer and the Justice Department take the view that the Sanchez-Llamas decision only dealt with an interpretation of the Convention’s meaning, not with an actual Court judgment in a specific case. Medellin contends, though, that the judgment is binding on the state on its own terms, under the Supremacy Clause, but the government takes the view that it is to be implemented because the President has said so.

The Court is expected to issue its final ruling on the case by late next spring.

[edit] Opinion Analysis

Lyle Denniston originally posted this entry at SCOTUSblog. The Supreme Court, in a sweeping rejection of claims of power in the presidency, ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the President does not have the authority to order states to relax their criminal procedures to obey a ruling of the World Court. The decision came in the case of Medellin v. Texas (06-984). Neither a World Court decision requiring U.S. states to provide new review of criminal cases involving foreign nationals, nor a memo by President Bush seeking to enforce the World Court ruling, preempts state law restrictions on challenges to convictions, the Court said in a ruling written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.

The Court explicitly, and with emphasis, rejected a presidential argument that the nation’s Chief Executive has power, on his own, to make an international treaty into binding law inside the U.S. That can only be done by Congress, it stressed.

The decision, aside from its rebuff of presidential power, also treats the World Court ruling itself as not binding on U.S. states, when it contradicts those states’ criminal procedure rules. The international treaty at issue in this dispute — the Vienna Convention that gives foreign nationals accused of crime a right to meet with diplomats from their home country — is not enforceable as a matter of U.S. law, the Roberts opinion said. And the World Court ruling seeking to implement that treaty inside the U.S. is also not binding, and does not gain added legal effect merely because the President sought to tell the states to abide by the decision, the Court added.

The ruling also is a defeat for 51 Mexican nationals who won a World Court decision in 2004, finding that U.S. states had denied them their consular access rights and advising the U.S. government to take steps to enforce the ruling. None of the 51 had been given access to a consular officer while their cases proceeded. In the specific case, Mexican national Jose Ernesto Medellin, convicted in state courts of murder, had sought to rely on the Vienna Convention. Texas courts ruled that he had defaulted on that right by failing to raise the issue at his trial. He then pursued a habeas challenge, arguing that the World Court decision and the Bush memo overrode the state default rule.

The Bush Administration did not agree with the World Court ruling, and, in fact, withdrew from the international protocol that gave the World Court the authority to enforce the Vienna Convention against countries that had signed it. Even so, Bush issued a memo in February 2005 agreeing that the U.S. would seek to obey the World Court, and he told the states involved to “give effect” to that tribunal’s decision in the cases of the 51 Mexicans involved in the World Court case. The U.S. government stepped into the case in Texas courts to assert the authority of the President to lay upon the states a duty follow his mandate to obey the World Court. The case thus reached the Supreme Court as a major test of presidential authority, in seeking to enforce treaty obligations, to override contradictory state criminal procedure rules. In that test, the presidency clearly lost.

The Chief Justice’s opinion was supported in full by Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice John Paul Stevens supported the result only. Stevens said that he found the issue to be a closer one than the Roberts opinion allowed, but said that he was persuaded “in the end” that the treaty did not authorize the Supreme Court to enforce the World Court’s ruling.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter.

In rejecting the Mexican nationals’ reliance on the World Court’s decision, the Chief Justice wrote that the ruling did impose “an international obligation on the part of the United States.” But that did not automatically give it legal effect “such that the judgment of its own force applies in state and federal courts.” The Court said that the legal effect of a World Court decision is controlled by Article 94 of the United Nations Charter, which means, the Court went on, that the U.S. and other member countries that submitted to World Court jurisdiction on a given dispute assume “a commitment…to take further action through their political branches to comply.” Thus, it added, Article 94 “is not a directive to domestic courts. It does not provide that the United States ’shall’ or ‘must’ comply” with such a ruling. Enforcement depends, it said, upon a diplomatic, not a judicial, remedy — that is, a political, not a legal, enforcement mechanism. The Court went on to say that this mechanism should not be turned over to state and federal courts in place of the political branches of the government.

“Our Framers established a careful set of procedures that must be followed before federal law can be created under the Constitution — vesting that decision in the political branches, subject to checks and balances,” Roberts wrote. To turn over to the judiciary the task of deciding when a treaty becomes domestic law, the Chief Justice added, would be to give the courts “the power not only to interpret but also to create the law.”

Turning to the question of the President’s authority to make the World Court decision binding domestically, the Court said that the Chief Executive’s power to act, as with the exercise of any governmental power, must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” It found no such authorization, rejecting claims that the Vienna Convention itself gives the President authority to implement the World Court ruling finding a U.S. violation, that Congress has acquiesced in that authority, that the President on his own has power to resolve international disputes apart from treaty enforcement, and that presidential power of that kind at issue is given by the Constitution’s allocation of power in the President to make sure that laws are “faithfully executed.”

Having found that the Vienna Convention is the kind of treaty that can only be executed in the U.S. if Congress expressly agrees to that, the Court said that the President may not do that on his own, or under some his interpretation of a treaty like the Vienna Convention. There is no congressional legislation to turn that Convention into domestic law, the Court found. If the President were to seek to unilaterally create domestic law, when a treaty ratified by the Senate was not a self-executing pact, that would contradict the Senate’s action of ratifying the treaty with the understanding it was not being made into domestic law. In that situation, the President’s power would be “at its lowest ebb,” quoting the famous formula laid out by Justice Robert Jackson in the Steel Seizure case in 1952 (Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer).

Quoting Founding Parent James Madison, saying that the President “in whom the whole executive power resides cannot of himself make a law,” the Chief Justice commented that that would “seem an apt description” of President Bush’s claim that he could unilaterally turn the Vienna Convention into domestic law.

Examining the government claim that Congress had, in fact, acquiesced in turning the World Court decision into domestic law, the Chief Justice found that none of the instances cited “remotely involved transforming an international obligation into domestic law and thereby displacing state law.”

The opinion stressed that the President could opt to comply with a treaty’s obligation “by some other means, so long as they are consistent with the Constitution.”

Refuting the government claim that the President’s February 2005 memorandum was a sufficient basis for implementing domestically the World Court ruling, the Chief Justice wrote: “The government has not identified a single instance in which the President has attempted (or Congress has acquiesced in) a Presidential directive issued to state cours, much less one that reaches deep into he heart of the State’s police powers and compels state courts to reopen final criminal judgments and set aside neutrally applicable state laws.”

[edit] Links and further information

[edit] Video

In a video from the American Constitution Society, Neal Katyal, professor of law, Georgetown University Law Center, discusses Medellin. [1]

[edit] Podcasts

Listen to Ohio State's John Quigley discuss the case in this 6-minute podcast. [2]

Listen to Ohio State's John Quigley discuss the ruling in this case in an 11-minute podcast. [3]

[edit] Links and further information

[edit] Press

[edit] Blogs and other online analysis

[edit] SCOTUSblog

  • Medellin Discussion Boards:

[4]; [5]; [6]; [7]


  • In an article on the American Constitution Society Blog, Martin Flaherty, Co-Director of the Crowley Program in International Human Rights, Fordham Law School, discusses how "Medellin Poses International Law and Separation of Powers Questions." [8]
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