After 9/11, lawyers for President George W. Bush’s administration argued that international law should not constrain American actions because international law ran contrary to the expansion of American power. Yet, as Legalist Empire shows, international law and American empire are not antithetical. In fact, between the War of 1898 and World War I, international lawyers helped to justify, and even orchestrate, the United States’ expansionist policies. Working at the intersection of legal history and American foreign relations, Coates offers an original interpretation of the first two decades of the twentieth century—the period when the United States asserted itself as a world power—contending that lawyers played a central role in making U.S. foreign policy. Not coincidentally, every secretary of state during this period held a law degree.
But in an era before the United Nations or the Geneva Conventions, what exactly was international law? This is a tricky question that Coates...