This comprehensive study focuses on international law as a current, practical means of regulating and influencing international behavior. David J. Bederman 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 series of cyclical processes and dialectics in international law over the past five centuries to assess its current prospects as a viable legal system.