de la Rasilla del Moral on International Law before Wilson

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral, Brunel Law School, has posted The Ambivalent Shadow of the Pre-Wilsonian Rise of International Law, which is to appear in a special issue of the Erasmus Law Review 7 (2014), entitled“The Great War and Law: The Lasting Effects of World War I on the Development of Law.”  Here is the abstract:    

The generation of American international lawyers who founded the American Society of International Law in 1906 and nurtured the soil for what has been retrospectively called a “moralistic legalistic approach to international relations” remains little studied. A survey of the rise of international legal literature in the U.S. from the mid-19th century to the eve of the Great War serves as a backdrop to the examination of the boosting effect on international law of the Spanish American War in 1898. An examination of the Insular Cases before the US Supreme Court is then accompanied by the analysis of a number of influential factors behind the prewar rise of international law in the U.S. The work concludes with an examination of the rise of natural law doctrines in international law during the interwar period and the critiques addressed .by the realist founders of the field of “international relations” to the “moralistic legalistic approach to international relations.”