U.S. Executive Agreements and Congressional Reporting Documents

Thousands of documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit provide an unprecedented look into the system for concluding and reporting U.S. executive agreements. The data, compiled by Oona A. Hathaway of Yale University, includes reported agreements and legal authority documents, supplemented by interviews with involved lawyers. This empirical analysis reveals systemic dysfunction and nonaccountability in the transparency regime for international commitments made without Senate approval.

Use Cases

• Analyze reporting compliance and gaps based on documents relating to agreements reported to Congress.
• Study the legal authority cited for agreements based on the obtained legal authority documents.
• Model systemic dysfunction and oversight failure based on the described opacity and incomplete reporting.
• Evaluate the transparency regime's effectiveness based on the combined document analysis and interview data.

Strengths

• Data source includes thousands of documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
• Analysis is supplemented by a series of interviews with lawyers directly involved in the process.
• Represents the first systematic assessment of the executive agreement transparency regime.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Yale University

Collection Method

Documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, supplemented by interviews.

Geography

United States