Brief Bio

After graduating from law school, Professor Vázquez served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then practiced law with Covington and Burling in Washington, DC, before joining the Georgetown Law faculty in 1990. From 2000 to 2003, he was a member of the Inter-American Juridical Committee, the organ of the Organization of American States responsible for juridical matters and for promoting the progressive development and codification of international law in the Americas. From 2012 to 2016, he was a member of the U.N. Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.  He is a member of the American Law Institute, where he is an adviser to the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law and a member of the Consultative Group for the Third Restatement of Conflict of Laws.  He was a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law from 2007 to 2017.  Professor Vázquez has written and taught primarily in the areas of international law, constitutional law, conflict of laws, and federal courts.

Representative Publications

Forthcoming Works and Works in Progress

  • AEDPA as Forum Allocation:  The Case for Overruling Williams v. Taylor (forthcoming in American Criminal Law Review)
  • Choice of Law as Geographic Scope Limitation, in Liber Amicorum for Lea Brilmayer (forthcoming 2018)
  • Treaty Self-Execution as “Foreign” Foreign Relations Law, in Oxford Handbook on Comparative Foreign Relations Law (C. Bradley, ed.) (forthcoming 2018) (with Duncan B. Hollis)

Contributions to Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals

  • Customary International Law as U.S. Law:  A Critique of the Intermediate Positions and Defense of the Modern Position, 86 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1495 (2011).
  • Treaties as Law of the Land:  The Supremacy Clause and the Judicial Enforcement of Treaties, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 599 (2008).
  • What Is Eleventh Amendment Immunity?, 106 Yale L.J. 1683 (1997)
  • The Four Doctrines of Self-Executing Treaties, 89 Am. J. Int’l L. 695 (1995)

Courses taught at CTLS

  • Foreign Relations Law: US and Comparative Perspectives (Fall 2017)
  • Core Course: Introduction to Transnational Law (Spring 2022, Fall 2018, Spring 2018)