Russia and the New Start
08/06/2010 | Author admin
There have been several articles this week about the delay in the Senate over the New Start Treaty, a nuclear arms agreement President Obama has negotiated with Russia. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Senate had shelved the treaty until the fall session, potentially not until after the midterm elections. This report was followed by a Times Editorial urging Senatorial critics to ratify.
While the treaty has gotten relatively little news coverage over the past few months, it has been an occasional hot topic. In early July Mitt Romney aired several criticisms of the treaty; this was followed with a harsh rebuttal by Senator Luger, one of the main Republican voices in support of the treaty.
You can decide the merits of the treaty yourself by looking it up on Westlaw. Treaties can be pulled via Find by Citation using various citation formats—the Senate Treaty Document number, the United States Treaties (U.S.T.) number, and the Treaties and Other International Agreements (T.I.A.S.) number, among others. These formats can be something of a mystery, however, to lawyers unaccustomed to treaties and international law.
An easier solution might be to go to the USTREATIES database. This database includes all treaties since 1778 to which the United States is a party, including treaties with American Indian tribes. The database has a template that allows you to search by treaty name, or to pull all treaties between the U.S. and a specific country.
In the case of the New Start treaty, a search in Treaty Title for “New Start” retrieves no results, since New Start is not the technical title of the treaty. However, a free-text search for “new start” will retrieve two results, the first of which is “A Treaty With Russia On Measures For Further Reduction And Limitation Of Strategic Offensive Arms”…also known as the “New START Treaty.” The treaty can also be viewed at S. Treaty Doc. No. 111-5.
There are several other treaty databases in addition to USTREATIES, including databases with many European and International treaties. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in USTREATIES, try CMB-TREATIES (which is the largest treaty database) or give the Reference Attorneys a call.
4 Responses to “Russia and the New Start”
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New post: Russia and the New Start http://bit.ly/dfR1CN
Just for the record, U.S. treaty documents are publicly available at no cost from the federal government on GPO Access and on the new GPO Fedsys site (go to http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys and find this treaty under Congressional Documents–Senate Treaty Doc 111-5).
Thanks for the response! You’re right about the GPO site being a good resource to be aware of. In this case, I wanted to begin with a full-text search. With the New Start treaty, I was reading a lot of articles that simply referred to the treaty by that name, so that was the only information I had to go by. It’s not uncommon for us to get calls from librarians and attorneys who are looking for something they read about in a newspaper article but, alas!, the article doesn’t give enough identifying information to retrieve the case or treaty. In circumstances like that we often need the ability to do free-text searches across all documents to find what we’re looking for.
Hi, Nate. Thanks for your response. Actually, free-text searching is available at the top of the website I linked to. Just search “Russia treaty” and this treaty pops right up. Of course, you need to know to search in Senate treaty docs. And, you are correct–a search for the “new start” treaty is more problematic and might be a reason to consult Westlaw or another outside source.