In the realm of international law, one often hears claims about US exceptionalism. Usually, such claims are invoked to suggest that the United States should be exempted from the legal obligations of other states, either because of troops around the world engaged in complex situations or because our constitutional or federal system of government makes the types of legal obligations other countries take on impossible for America to embrace. The claims for US exceptionalism are usually made in sweeping tones, with the suggestion that the United States has always been exceptional when it comes to international law and international courts. The Sword and the Scales takes a positivist approach in examining the US relationship to international courts and tribunals across time. The chapters are carefully chosen by the editor to ensure that all of the most important dimensions of the US relationship to international courts and tribunals are considered.

The book begins with a chapter by John B. Bellinger, who at the time was the legal advisor to the secretary of state for the George W. Bush administration. Any claim to US exceptionalism is made not by government officials but by legal advocates (usually conservative lawyers and pundits, with liberal lawyers critiquing the conservatives' claim). Bellinger's job was to articulate, in the most reasonable way possible, the Bush administration's approach to international law and international courts. He does his task well. As Cesare Romano says in the conclusion, Bellinger's argument in favor of a “pragmatic” case-by-case approach to international courts is so commonsensical, who could possibly disagree? Bellinger accentuates the positive. For example, he soft-pedals the fact that the Bush administration was the first to ever “unsign” a treaty and actively pressured countries to sign bilateral treaties that promised not to turn Americans over to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Instead, he focuses on how the Bush administration has supported the workings of the ICC on specific cases.

The next 11 chapters empirically investigate US practice vis-à-vis international courts and tribunals. Steven Kull and Clay Ramsey, of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), provide a tight synthetic review of the public opinion evidence about US attitudes toward international courts and tribunals. The chapter also briefly discusses PIPA's findings regarding the issues that most vexed the administration: how international law should affect the treatment of detainees at Guantanomo Bay, whether Americans should be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and what constitutes torture. Strong majorities of the public, it seems, expect the United States to be fully subject to the authority of international law and international courts. Kull and Ramsey's analysis confirms that the greatest source of variation in opinion comes from partisan identification as Democrat or Republican.

Mary Ellen O'Connell provides a historical review of US approaches to international arbitration with respect to the issue of war, which is central to the exceptionalism claim. Her review covers the highlights from 1776 until the end of World War I. Sean Murphy takes a more philosophical approach to the US relationship with the International Court of Justice, investigating the “antinomies,” where a reified United States might seem to advocate contrary positions at both the same and different times. Melissa Waters investigates recent US Supreme Court decisions regarding the authority of the International Court of Justice. John Cerone investigates US approaches to international criminal prosecutions from 1899 to the present. He finds that the United States consistently supports the use of international legal venues to review the crimes of others, but not the crimes of Americans.

The rest of the empirical chapters focus on instances when the United States has in some way consented to international judicial authority. For example, although the United States has not yet ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, it is a member of the Organization for American States, and Elizabeth A. H. Abi-Mershad teases out the varied ways in which the United States and its citizens are part of an Inter-American Human Rights system that has not been formally embraced. The United States actively participates in Inter-American Commission investigations of violations of human rights, and it offers legal arguments in cases adjudicated before the Inter-American Court. US behavior has also been the subject of litigation in advisory opinion cases, and Americans have served on the commission and court. Abi-Mershad suggests that this active and in-kind participation serves to build the Inter-American human rights system, which the United States continues to disavow at times.

Tara J. Melish considers US participation in various United Nations human rights bodies, largely concurring with Andrew Moravcisk's argument that the US treaty ratification system and conservative opposition are responsible for the apparent anomaly of the United States with respect to ratification of international human rights conventions. Melish shows, however, that the United States has ratified a number of international human rights treaties, and the government is an active participant in the global system of international human rights promotion, including allowing scrutiny of its own behavior. John R. Crook shows that the United States is not averse to using international claims and compensation bodies, focusing on its embrace of the Iran—US Claims Tribunal, the Holocaust Victims Compensation Mechanisms, and the UN Compensation Commission. Jeff L. Dunoff explains the active involvement of the United States in the juridicization of the trade dispute system of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, taking us in time through the establishment and use of the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system. David A. Gantz provides a comprehensive summary of US attitudes toward. and engagement with, four legal mechanisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Susan L. Karamanian investigates in even more detail the controversies surrounding Chapter 11 investor disputes under NAFTA.

Editor Romano did an excellent job picking selections that cover every important dimension of the US relationship with international courts and tribunals, and he kept the authors brief, grounded, and on task. Political scientists will appreciate that for the most part, the lawyer-authors stayed in the realm of empirical positivism, thereby providing the information that political scientists need to evaluate claims about American exceptionalism. The only explicitly normative chapter is by Romano, who ends with a plea that in being “pragmatic” in its approach to international courts and tribunals, the United States should also be longsighted and less hysterical.

The book is one-stop shopping to get a thorough background on how the United States actually interacts with international courts and tribunals. The analysis shows that the United States is not very exceptional. Federal systems with strong supreme courts have their own difficulties interacting with international legal bodies. America is somewhat unusual in that the thresholds needed to ratify treaties in the US political system, combined with vehement Republican opposition, provide evidence of US opposition to international law and international courts and tribunals. Since specific US governments and officials get upset when international legal actors challenge their goals and policies, there are also examples of US defiance. But closer scrutiny of US behavior calls into question sweeping claims of US exceptionalism. The United States is one of a number of diverse and decentralized countries whose leaders at times respond somewhat inconsistently in the face of similar difficulties. The Sword and the Scales helps get beyond debates where each side cherry-picks evidence to make categorical claims, and as such it is an important addition to the literature on the United States and international law.