ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to gain a sense of the trajectory of international law into the twenty-first century. Such a task cannot be effectively undertaken by an empirical measure of the volume of rules, institutions, and court rulings that make up the corpus of international law. The core principles of international law provide the foundation on which secondary rules of engagement are based and understood. The Treaties of Westphalia established the nationstate as the primary actor in world politics. The general acceptance of legal positivism as a doctrine of international law, therefore, represents a core principle of the legal order during the Classic Legal Order. The Classic Legal System produced a series of core principles—legal positivism, the state the primary legal person, doctrine of intervention, and neutrality—that provided the foundation of modern international law for three centuries.
