(b) When the parties to a treaty continue to assert its vitality, a private person may not invoke the doctrine of rebus sic stantibus to assert that a treaty ceases to be binding when there has been a substantial change in conditions since its promulgation. To the contrary, the Executive Branch continues to maintain that the Convention's liability limit remains enforceable in the United States. And neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has given the required notice to other parties to the Convention that the United States planned to abrogate the Convention.
Since the Convention is a self-executing treaty, no domestic legislation is required to give it the force of law in the United States. Here, neither the legislative histories of the various PVMA's, the history of the repealing Act, nor the repealing Act itself, make any reference to theĬonvention, the repeal being unrelated to the Convention and intended to give formal effect to a new international monetary system. (a) Legislative silence is not sufficient to abrogate a treaty. The Convention's cargo liability limit remains enforceable in United States courts, and was not rendered unenforceable by the 1978 repeal of the PVMA. The Court of Appeals affirmed, but also ruled that, 60 days from the issuance of the mandate, the Convention's liability limit would be unenforceable in the United States, since enforcement of the Convention required a factor for converting the liability limit into dollars, and there was no United States legislation specifying a factor to be used by United States courts.ġ. The District Court ruled that, under the Convention, the liability was limited to $6,475.98, a figure derived from the weight of the packages, the Convention's liability limit, and the last official price of gold in the United States. The parties having stipulated that TWA was responsible for the loss, the only dispute was the extent of liability. brought suit in Federal District Court against Trans World Airlines (TWA) to recover damages in the amount of $250,000 for the loss in 1979 of packages containing numismatic materials delivered to TWA for transport from Philadelphia to London. As a result, a $9.07-per-pound limit of liability remained codified in the CAB regulations governing international air carriers' tariffs filed under the Federal Aviation Act of 1958. Nevertheless, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) continued to sanction the use of the last official price of gold as a conversion factor. In 1978, Congress repealed the Par Value Modification Act (PVMA), which set an "official" price of gold in the United States. The Warsaw Convention (Convention), an international air carriage treaty that the United States ratified in 1934, sets a limit on an air carrier's liability for lost cargo at 250 gold French francs per kilogram, which sum may be converted into any national currency.
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