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In the concluding remarks, I put forward some reflections on Scott’s legacy and the significance of his work to articulate a responsible approach to the history of international law today. The Spanish origin narrative resulted from Scott’s contingent choices, proving his agency in the reshaping of international legal history. A responsible self-understanding of the profession should acknowledge the relevance of individual and collective stances. As international lawyers we are situated political actors. Awareness of this condition should be reflected in the histories we write. Narratives of timeless principles or inevitable progress downplay the concrete role of human action in shaping of the reality we live in. The engaged and responsible historical study of international legal doctrines should instead put close analysis of practice, sociological aspects of the profession, and the social and political stakes lawyers face at its center.

In the interwar years, international lawyer James Brown Scott wrote a series of works on the history of his discipline. He made the case that the foundation of modern international law rested not, as most assumed, with the seventeenth-century Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius, but with sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria. Far from being an antiquarian assertion, the Spanish origin narrative placed the inception of international law in the context of the discovery of America, rather than in the European wars of religion. The recognition of equal rights to the American natives by Vitoria was the pedigree on which Scott built a progressive international law, responsive to the rise of the United States as the leading global power and developments in international organization such as the creation of the League of Nations. The book describes the Spanish origin project in context, relying on Scott’s biography, changes in the self-understanding of the international legal profession, as well as on larger social and political trends in US and global history. Keeping in mind Vitoria’s persisting role as a key figure in the canon of international legal history, the book sheds light on the contingency of shared assumptions about the discipline and their unspoken implications. The legacy of the international law Scott developed for the American century is still with the profession today, in the shape of the normalization and de-politicization of rights language and of key concepts like equality and rule of law.

The fifth chapter tracks Scott’s fascination with Catholicism and his attempts to persuade the Vatican to endorse the brand of international law he championed as conducive to global peace. The first section provides an account of why the Presbyterian Scott believed that the Holy See could play a crucial role in sustaining the moral foundations of global politics. It then moves on to detail Scott’s early approaches to the Curia, marred by the outbreak of the First World War. Section 2 describes how, in the postwar years, Scott was influenced by a Neo-Scholastic movement internal to US Catholicism, tracing modern democracy back to Thomist theology. Scott used these lessons to develop further his argument and enlarge the coalition, promoting Vitoria as the founder of international law. Section 3 tells of Scott’s last and best-prepared approach to the Holy See in favor of international law in the mid-1930s.

The third chapter revolves around the series of books on US constitutional history Scott published at the closing of the Great War. Therein, he fleshed out his case for the creation of an international court as the best tool toward the achievement of a long-lasting global peace. The first section describes Scott’s Armistice books and their background, explaining the foundations and development of the rationalist legal theory of adjudication that inspired them. The second section goes deeper into the content of the most significant of the books, The United States: A Study in International Organization, in order to contextualize it and relate it to the political debates in which it intervened. The third and closing section is centered on Scott’s role in the debate over the League of Nations Covenant and collective security in the United States.