2 Introduction
With Washington as one of his readers, he could claim some deserved satis-
faction on this point.
Vattel may have been the fi rst person to bring international law to a large
lay audience. But his subject was very far from new at the time that he wrote.
In terms of practices such as treaty making or the according of certain legal
privileges to envoys, international law extends just about as far backward as
the historical record itself. If, however, we look for something rather more
demanding— such as a systematic corpus of rules governing relations be-
tween states in general— then we must look to somewhat more recent times,
to the fi rst millennium bc and the early centuries of the Christian era. By
any mea sure, however, the subject is a hoary one.
According to the standard defi nition, international law is the body of law
governing relations between states. To my way of thinking, though, that is a
rather dry- sounding summation— and hardly adequate either. For one thing,
the idea of a body of law regulating relations between in de pen dent and ju-
ridically equal states became applicable only very late in history, in the sev-
enteenth century. But ideas of justice in international relations go back a
great deal further— practically as far as recorded history itself. Th is history
is, accordingly, an exploration of the various ways in which conceptions of
justice have played a part on the world stage.
In describing the subject to beginning students, I prefer to characterize it as
the scientifi c study of the emergence of order out of chaos. How is it possible—
even in theory, let alone in practice— to have a legal “system” of any kind
between states when there is no ruler to promulgate it? Where does it come
from? And why is it obeyed? International law is not so much a list of rules, as a
response to the challenge of devising answers to these befuddling queries.
Th is book may therefore be described as the story of the search for
answers to these questions (and similar ones) over the course of human his-
tory. Our concern will not be so much with the actual content of that law—
which we can safely leave in the hands of professional lawyers— as with the
general nature and character of it, how it has been made, how it has been
interpreted, how it has been applied in practice, and, above all, with how the
answers given to these basic questions have changed over the years. It will be
seen that, over the course of its long history, international law has been sub-
jected to reverend worship, constructive criticism, scornful dismissal, and
just about every fate in between.