Using a multi-disciplinary approach, this volume shows how international law shapes behavior.

As our society becomes more global, international law is taking on an increasingly significant role, not only in world politics but also in the affairs of a striking array of individuals, enterprises, and institutions. In this comprehensive study, David J. Bederman focuses on international law as a current, practical means of regulating and influencing international behavior. He shows it to be a system unique in its nature—nonterritorial but secular, cosmopolitan, and traditional. Part intellectual history and part contemporary review, The Spirit of International Law ranges across the series of cyclical processes and dialectics in international law over the past five centuries to assess its current prospects as a viable legal system. After addressing philosophical concerns about authority and obligation in international law, Bederman considers the sources and methods of international lawmaking. Topics include key legal actors in the international system, the permissible scope of international legal regulation (what Bederman calls the "subjects and objects" of the discipline), the primitive character of international law and its ability to remain coherent, and the essential values of international legal order (and possible tensions among those values). Bederman then measures the extent to which the rules of international law are formal or pragmatic, conservative or progressive, and ignored or enforced. Finally, he reflects on whether cynicism or enthusiasm is the proper attitude to govern our thoughts on international law. Throughout his study, Bederman highlights some of the canonical documents of international law: those arising from famous cases (decisions by both international and domestic tribunals), significant treaties, important diplomatic correspondence, and serious international incidents. Distilling the essence of international law, this volume is a lively, broad, thematic summation of its structure, characteristics, and main features.

A runner-up for the 2018 Chadwick Alger Prize, International Studies Association's International Organization Section, this provocative reassessment of the rule of law in world politics examines how and why governments use and manipulate international law in foreign policy.

There has long been an advocacy for the sociology of international law, and yet it has never been constructed so systematically and axiomatically as in this book. Based on vital terms such as 'action' and 'system, ' this book has conducted an investigation into the 'auspices' or the fundamental international sociological conditions over which international law is built, and accordingly, into how international law can control global relations. The significance of this work lies in its aim of showing by the application of a consistent logic, how complex observed phenomena can be explained and understood on the basis of certain shared fundamental perceptions drawn from common experience. By asking how a state acts in a complex system that consists of at least two subsystems having different goals and different logics, two specific issues are discussed: (1) The relationship between domestic and international law, namely, that between Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan and the UN Charter (especially the provisions for a collective security system as mentioned in chapter VII), (2) The relationship between international law and international politics, namely, the relationship between the prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons and the logic of nuclear deterrence.

Why U.S. support for international law is so inconsistent