Tracking Down Treaties - Help Arrives From the Dep't. of State

In Where Have All the Treaties Gone?, Duncan Hollis, one of the law professor authors of  the international law and politics blog Opinio Juris, reports that (after a big nudge from Congress), the Department of State has added almost 1500 bilateral and multilateral treaties and other international agreements to its web site. 

This is good news for legal researchers, since up until this point free government sources of recent U.S. treaties were very thin on the ground.

The collection begins in 1998, which almost takes you back to the most recent issues of TIAS (now current through 1996). The treaties are part of the United States Department of State's FOIA Electronic Reading Room.

You can see all 1480 treaties and agreements by checking the box to left of "International Agreements" and then clicking  the "List All" button under the search box.

Or, more practically, you can run a variety of searches.  You can search by key word or phrase (e.g., lumber or ozone or "mutual defense"); by country name  with or without key words (e.g., Canada, or, e.g., Russia and nuclear); or by a phrase from the title of an agreement (e.g., Surrender of Persons to the International Criminal Court). Adding the term "multilateral" to any search helps limit results to multilateral treaties.

The treaties and agreements are exact page images in PDF format.

[A virtual tip o' the hat to: Terri Gallego O’Rourke, the Reference and International Law Librarian at Boston University.]