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Private International Family Law has been challenged by the impact of recent social changes. Such an impact is shaped by an increasing globalization, new types of families, and, especially, technology and biomedical developments. Some of the new complex situations call for the creation of original solutions. Latin American countries are making efforts to gradually include in their domestic Private International Law provisions that capture this scenario. However, some international treaties still in force in the region were drafted many years ago, reflecting cultural, religious and social conceptions which have been outgrown by new realities and principles nowadays prevailing. This chapter shows some of the difficulties, possibilities and challenges that the most relevant multilateral legal instruments currently face in Latin America. It also explores and highlights the work of several international bodies in order to achieve the international protection of families and, in particular, to guarantee the rights of children.

Chapter 3 examines the creation of the international law profession in the United States, focusing in particular on the American Society of International Law (founded in 1906) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (founded in 1910). It argues that the agenda of professional organizations reflected legalists’ search for authority in the social, cultural, and ideological context of the early twentieth-century United States. The growth of law schools and the law profession, the nature of legal thought, prevailing racial and gender discourses, and the needs of professionalism all contributed. As a result of this context—and of the important personal influence of James Brown Scott—these organizations came to embrace a judicialist sensibility of international law in the years leading up to World War I. Despite a diversity of personal views, the profession as a whole was congenial to elite interests.

Chapter 2 analyzes the initial encounter and engagement between James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez and the construction of a hemispheric legal network through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and the American Institute of International Law (AIIL), as originally conceived by both Scott and Alvarez, and its early history through the second decade of the twentieth century. It also examines Robert Bacon’s visit to South America (1913), repeating Elihu Root’s previous itinerary and the first two institutional meetings of the AIIL held in Washington, D.C., (1915–1916) and in Havana (1917). It also traces a genealogy of the rise of the hemispheric ideal of American international law, analyzing the formation of a common set of shared ideals and practices in the United States and Latin America.

Chapter 6 concentrates on the role of Saavedra Lamas at the Seventh Pan-American Conference held in Montevideo (1933), the impact of his Anti-War Treaty, and the rise of a multilateral Inter-American System by 1933 with the institutionalization of the principles of nonintervention and sovereign equality and autonomy. It also analyzes the crisis of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL) in 1933, the interruption of its activities for several years in the 1930s, and the final dissolution of the organization in the early 1940s. It was no coincidence that an organization such as the AIIL with a US-led imperial and missionary legal project of civilizing Latin America through the promotion of the international rule of law was dissolved when the principles of non-intervention and sovereign equality were institutionalized under a new multilateral Inter-American System and the Platt Amendment finally derogated in Cuba.

This chapter narrates the trajectory of reform-minded scholars’ discussions to illustrate an intellectual context that is important for an understanding of the issues involving US hegemony and international law. It examines how prominent liberal scholars in the interwar years―Quincy Wright, Manley O Hudson, and Charles G Fenwick―viewed the conditions of the time. During the 1950s Cold War lawyers who had previously devoted their efforts to solidifying the framework of collective security became confused and increasingly divided. There was a growing division of opinion over the best response to present and future events. Events of the 1960s, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, further accelerated this trend. While Wright found great powers’ attitudes toward international law controversial, Fenwick justified US official policy in the name of law. Thus, the story of this debate highlights changing academic currents in the international law community, serving as intellectual underpinnings for US post-war hegemony.

The first chapter, like all others in the book, is divided in three sections. Section 1 offers an analysis of the US foreign policy discourse at the turn of the century and connects it with the growing popularity of international law within the elites. Section 2 follows Scott in his work as Secretary Root’s legal advisor at the State Department, until the two moved together to lead the newly established Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The highlight of Scott’s government stint was the 1907 Second Hague Peace Conference, where he championed the project for an international court and created a large part of the transatlantic professional connections that would be crucial to his later projects. Section 3 describes how Scott, since 1910 a powerful administrator at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, deployed the massive resources at his disposal.