¹ Malgosia, Fitzmaurice & Panos, Merkouris, Treaties in Motion: The Evolution of Treaties from Formation to Termination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² 23 May 1969, 1155 UNTS 331, Can TS 1980 No 37 (entered into force 27 January 1980).

³ The authors acknowledge that they have expanded Aristole’s last category of movement from a change in place (kata topon metavole) to a change in time and place. Fitzmaurice & Merkouris, supra note 1 at 336.

⁴ Ibid at 339.

⁵ Ibid at 169.

⁶ The authors also address revision, although they indicate that the International Law Commission (ILC) considered the difference between amendment and revision to be “artificial.” Ibid at 187.

⁷ See “Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts” in Report of the International Law Commission, UN GAOR, 56th Sess, Supp No 10, UN Doc. A/56/10 (2001) at 26–30.

⁸ To clearly distinguish alteration from increase and diminution, one might think of the dictum attributed (apocryphally) to Lavoisier: “Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme” (“nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”). This is in fact a paraphrase of a longer passage found in Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de chimie (Paris: Cuchet, 1789) at 140–41.

⁹ The motion of alteration seems to be the epitome of interpretation, a process through which the parties’ obligations should neither be increased nor diminished. See e.g. Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (Annex 2 to the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization), 15 April 1994, 1869 UNTS 401, art 3(2) (entered into force 1 January 1995), which states that Dispute Settlement Body recommendations and rulings “cannot add to or diminish the rights and obligations provided in the covered agreements.”

¹⁰ Island of Palmas Case (Netherlands v United States) (1928), 2 RIAA 829.

¹¹ Fitzmaurice & Merkouris, supra note 1 at 193.