An amended and restated agreement, at its simplest, is a document that revises and incorporates an existing contract; essentially, it is a contract that is a new version of some older contract. However, that does not give enough attention to the importance of this instrument in the field of international law, and how its evolution traces the slow but irreversible shifts in global standards.
Understanding the international legal scene means understanding how amended agreements effectuate change in legal norms. This process is not arbitrary, and in fact mirrors changes in the paradigm of education, which emphasizes how transformative international law has been. As students of history understand, the generation that sent a man into space is the same generation that saw the ideological and governmental evolution of the 20th Century into the new millennium. The most important lesson of that century is that law governs us all, although law itself is subject to the complex principles of social science, which include sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics and other known disciplines that have governed the production of knowledge and human thought.
As with amended and restated agreements, each discipline gives rise to new standards, but the only way to access those standards is to gracefully navigate the complex exchange between disciplines. Lawyers understand this as the cross-pollination of law, a process that predicates constitutional and amendment legal systems. Thus, as international law has evolved, so too have legal standards that serve the expectations of lawyers. When the balance between social constructs becomes unstable, the system readjusts itself through formal discussions and debates within legal bodies.
International collaborators, including academic institutions, benefit from an understanding of these legal frameworks. Just as amended and restated agreements cooperate with international structures, so too do universities and colleges benefit from the application of such legal instruments; without them, institutions are bound to the stagnation of paradigms that long ago became ineffective.
In pedagogy, academic leaders now face problems with actionable solutions, and lawyers increasingly create templates that not only solve existing problems, but also predict new problems. To have an edge in this new legal environment, international collaborators in academia must insist on the need for innovative legal solutions. Traditional understanding of agreements won’t do: students are not interested in the past, they want to know where the world is going and scholars need to be ready with answers.