Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century

[First paragraph] The United States seized its place as a world power in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and it consolidated that power through the first two decades of the twentieth century. While the history of that rise to power has been told many times before, until now no one had fully integrated that history with the history of international law. In Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century, Benjamin Allen Coates does just that, examining how the development of international law went hand in hand with the development of foreign policy. In doing so, he effectively reveals that international lawyers were deeply embedded in the American political system, and that their ideas about international law reinforced American imperialism and ideas about civilization in the years prior to World War I.