As a classic text of the New Haven School of International Law, this book explores human rights and international law in the broadest sense, taking into account social sciences research while embracing all values secured, or consequently fulfilled, or needed to thus be achieved. The re-issuance of this venerable title, unveils this work to a new generation of scholars, students, and practitioners of international law and human rights.

Law and Order offers a valuable new study of the political and social history of the 1960s. It presents a sophisticated account of how the issues of street crime and civil unrest enhanced the popularity of conservatives, eroded the credibility of liberals, and transformed the landscape of American politics. Ultimately, the legacy of law and order was a political world in which the grand ambitions of the Great Society gave way to grim expectations. In the mid-1960s, amid a pervasive sense that American society was coming apart at the seams, a new issue known as law and order emerged at the forefront of national politics. First introduced by Barry Goldwater in his ill-fated run for president in 1964, it eventually punished Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats and propelled Richard Nixon and the Republicans to the White House in 1968. In this thought-provoking study, Michael Flamm examines how conservatives successfully blamed liberals for the rapid rise in street crime and then skillfully used law and order to link the understandable fears of white voters to growing unease about changing moral values, the civil rights movement, urban disorder, and antiwar protests. Flamm documents how conservatives constructed a persuasive message that argued that the civil rights movement had contributed to racial unrest and the Great Society had rewarded rather than punished the perpetrators of violence. The president should, conservatives also contended, promote respect for law and order and contempt for those who violated it, regardless of cause. Liberals, Flamm argues, were by contrast unable to craft a compelling message for anxious voters. Instead, liberals either ignored the crime crisis, claimed that law and order was a racist ruse, or maintained that social programs would solve the "root causes" of civil disorder, which by 1968 seemed increasingly unlikely and contributed to a loss of faith in the ability of the government to do what it was above all sworn to do-protect personal security and private property.

International law’s archipelago is composed of legal “islands”, which are highly organized, and “offshore” zones, manifesting a much lower degree of legal organization. Each requires a different mode of decisionmaking, each further complicated by the stress of radical change. This General Course is concerned, first, with understanding and assessing the aggregate performance of the world constitutive process, in present and projected constructs; second, with providing the intellectual tools that can enable those involved in making decisions to be more effective, whether they are operating in islands or offshore; and, third, with inquiring into ways the international legal system might be improved. Reisman identifies the individual as the ultimate actor in international law and explores the dilemmas of meaningful individual commitment to a world order of human dignity amidst interlocking communities and overlapping loyalties.

The policy-oriented approach of the New Haven School is widely recognized as a major contribution to the legal and jurisprudential debate on interpretation. Eschewing mechanical textual methods, on the one hand, and anti-textual, solipsistic methods, on the other, the New Haven School has developed a comprehensive and systematic approach to the interpretation of human communication. Drawing upon psychology, legal experience, and communications theory, of which Lasswell was a founder, the authors have developed a theoretically cogent and practical method of interpretation. In the course of doing it, they survey the existing literature, showing its problems. In addition to the original text of The Interpretation of Agreements, this edition includes a new introduction, in which developments since the appearance of the book are examined and appraised, and three important papers which elaborate the theory developed here, including Professor McDougal's scathing critique of the last major international conference on the law of treaties.