As our society becomes more global, international law is taking on an increasingly significant role, not only in world politics but also in the affairs of a striking array of individuals, enterprises, and institutions. In this comprehensive study, David J. Bederman focuses on international law as a current, practical means of regulating and influencing international behavior. He shows it to be a system unique in its nature--nonterritorial but secular, cosmopolitan, and traditional. Part intellectual history and part contemporary review, "The Spirit of International Law" ranges across the...

"The Spirit of Japanese Law" focuses on the century following the Meiji Constitution, Japan's initial reception of continental European law. As John Owen Haley traces the features of contemporary Japanese law and its principal actors, distinctive patterns emerge. Of these none is more ubiquitous than what he refers to as the law's "communitarian orientation."

While most westerners may view judges as Japanese law's least significant actors, Haley argues that they have the last word because their interpretations of constitution and codes define the authority and powers they and others...

Despite the long reach of classical canon law--across Europe, well into modern times, and into such secular subjects as theft, wills, and the sale of goods--it has been the subject of far too few general studies in English. Illuminating the basic nature of the canon, this work explores the roles of moral, social, political, and religious values in the laws' development through the seventeenth century. At the same time, R. H. Helmholz makes relevant the attitudes and formal techniques of the laws' authors, practitioners, and interpreters.

Helmholz first discusses the origins of the canon...