The territorial state is the foundation for virtually all law in the modern world. It is a legal institution itself, of course, and a hugely important one at that. And yet precisely because it is so ubiquitous, it often evades the radar of contemporary scholarship. We have massive literatures on any number of arcane areas, but too little good work on the territorial state that lies at the base of it all. The great success of Raustiala's book is that it excavates the foundations of our law.

Raustiala's basic thesis is that during the past century, the traditional territorial limits of the law have given way to a robust system of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Among the sharpest claims in the book is the powerfully persuasive argument that since World War II, arcane doctrines of extraterritoriality have served as substitutes for the pith helmets and Maxim guns of old-fashioned empire. Empire fell into illegitimacy. But in its place we saw the rise of powerful legal doctrines of extraterritoriality in the world's most powerful state, doctrines that allowed U.S. law to spread around the world. In antitrust law, for example, Judge Learned Hand established a broad approach to extraterritorial jurisdiction U.S. law that reached around the world to regulate any conduct that had effects on U.S. markets. In treaty law, the U.S. military entered into Status of Forces Agreements—so-called SOFAs—that carried U.S. legal principles around the globe to virtually anywhere U.S. soldiers could be found.

Raustiala's argument is a wonderful application of the scholarship on the origins and basic functions of the territorial state. Hendrik Spruyt, Charles Tilly, and others have argued that the territorial state emerged as the dominant political form in the early modern period because it was functionally best suited to warfare. Territorial states were extremely good at financing wars and mobilizing populations. They came to dominate the world because of how good they were at advancing the interests of those who had a stake in them. It should hardly be surprising, then, to see territoriality in the law advancing the interests of successful states in the international arena.

Raustiala also proposes a new term for thinking about the geography of legal systems, “intraterritoriality,” by which Raustiala means the internal geographic variation of a state's legal system. Once again, the literature on the origins of the territorial state also sheds light on Raustiala's book. The territorial state took root and won out in the Darwinian competition with its rivals in part because of its superior internal economic functionality. Territorial states were better able to coordinate the interests of their members. They were able to remove obstacles to trade such as the medieval profusion of varying systems of weights and measures. They essentially created sizeable trading zones. And if we move a bit later in history, out of the late medieval and early modern periods into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we can see the same questions of economic scale produce a robust debate among political thinkers about the right size for a nation.

Raustiala's idea is that we should pay greater attention to the internal geography of U.S. law. He pays special attention to cases about the extension of U.S. law to outlying territories—cases that first emerged in the Indian controversies and then in the age of U.S. empire after the Spanish-American War. But for reasons that are hard to grasp, Raustiala ignores what is almost certainly the most important dimension of “intraterritoriality” in U.S. law: federalism. His account of the debate over whether the constitution followed the flag in the territories strangely ignores the fact that until the twentieth-century incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states, many provisions of the Constitution barely followed the Union standard into the states.

This failing aside, Raustiala has produced an insightful, wonderfully written account of the recent history of one of our important legal institutions: the territorial state. If we are lucky, his first-rate book will touch off further scholarship on the history of the territorial state.