In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century by Benjamin Allen Coates
  • Katherine Unterman
Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century. By Benjamin Allen Coates (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016) 284pp. $35.00

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 [End Page 104] 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 spends considerable time parsing. No unified school of American international law existed in the early twentieth century; in fact, the idea that international law itself even existed was debatable. Coates, however, finds a critical mass of influential lawyers who shared what he calls a “judicialist” sensibility—a belief that legal techniques and institutions could solve international conflicts in the present and prevent them in the future (3). Not surprisingly, the international institutions that they proposed reflected American principles, practices, and interests. They often held up the U.S. Supreme Court as a model for an international court and insisted that matters like the Monroe Doctrine and the Chinese Exclusion Act not be subject to international scrutiny.

Many of the events covered in Legalist Empire are well known to students of early twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations: the annexation of the Philippines; the securing of the Panama Canal; the seizure of Dominican customs houses; armed interventions in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean; and the neutrality debates before America’s entry into World War I. Yet, from Coates’ perspective, what is otherwise familiar becomes new; he views these incidents through the eyes of the lawyers. Alongside Elihu Root and William Howard Taft, he introduces lesser-known yet critical figures such as John Bassett Moore and James Brown Scott, two of the most prominent international-law authorities of their day. He focuses not on the military or economic side of empire but on the ways in which lawyers legitimized foreign actions and protected American capital abroad.

Coates spends a good deal of the book deciphering the mentalities of American international lawyers such as Moore and Scott. He looks to their professional networks and organizations—such as the American Society of International Law (founded in 1906) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (founded in 1910)—to understand how they made sense of international law. He also examines the broader discursive context to explain why these lawyers frequently utilized the language of “civilization.” Thus, this book is not simply a diplomatic history but also an intellectual, cultural, and institutional one.

Yet World War I showed that law did not prevent atrocities. Interestingly, whereas President Theodore Roosevelt looked to State Department [End Page 105] lawyers to justify his military aggression in legal terms, President Woodrow Wilson—often portrayed as a champion of international law—expressly rejected the participation of lawyers in drafting the Versailles Treaty. By 1920, the judicialist project was in decline and the international legal community had split. Nevertheless, lawyers with diverse agendas continued to invoke the authority of “international law.”

Legalist Empire helps to expand the historiography of U.S. foreign relations by placing international law alongside military, economic, and cultural hegemony. It also complicates our understanding of international law, often treated solely as a post-1945 phenomenon, by chronicling its development and deployment in an earlier period. Ultimately, however, Coates wavers about whether law is merely a rhetorical cover for the application of other...

pdf

Share