The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations is a well-edited collection of annotated documents illustrating the Church's doctrine regarding war and peace and its opinion of such topics as the League of Nations, nationality and minority rights. Valuable for its insights into the history, doctrine and traditions of Catholic thought on international law, it includes important papal writings that are difficult to locate and otherwise unavailable in English. Published for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace by the Catholic Association for International Peace. Reprint of the sole edition. "Being somewhat familiar with the Catholic tradition and an outspoken advocate of the Catholic conception of international law, the reviewer feels no hesitancy in recommending unreservedly Mr. Eppstein's excellent compendium of The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations." --JAMES BROWN SCOTT, Georgetown Law Journal 24 (1935-1936) 1063 JOHN EPPSTEIN [1895-1988] was the author of numerous books on Catholicism and human rights, including Catholics and the Problem of Peace (1925), Code of International Ethics (1953) and The Cult of Revolution of the Church (1974).

The way that Americans understand their Constitution and wider legal tradition has been dominated in recent decades by two exhausted approaches: the originalism of conservatives and the “living constitutionalism” of progressives. Is it time to look for an alternative? Adrian Vermeule argues that the alternative has been there, buried in the American legal tradition, all along. He shows that US law was, from the founding, subsumed within the broad framework of the classical legal tradition, which conceives law as “a reasoned ordering to the common good.” In this view, law’s purpose is to promote the goods a flourishing political community requires: justice, peace, prosperity, and morality. He shows how this legacy has been lost, despite still being implicit within American public law, and convincingly argues for its recovery in the form of “common good constitutionalism.” This erudite and brilliantly original book is a vital intervention in America’s most significant contemporary legal debate while also being an enduring account of the true nature of law that will resonate for decades with scholars and students.