Over the last fifteen years, the problem of human trafficking has become a focus of government and advocacy agendas worldwide. Increasingly referred to as “modern-day slavery,” the phenomenon has prompted rapid proliferation of international, regional, and national anti-trafficking laws, and inspired states to devote enormous financial and bureaucratic resources to its eradication. It has also spawned an industry of nonprofits that have elevated the “abolition” of trafficking into a pressing moral campaign, which anyone can join with the click of a mouse. Scholars have also jumped into the fray, calling on states to marshal human rights law, tax law, trade law, tort law, public health law, labor law, and even military might to combat this apparently growing international crime and human rights violation.

International law is a system; its environment is the field of international relations. Although the word system is often used generically, it has a formal meaning in “general systems theory,” an interdisciplinary methodology that grew out of cybernetics research in the 1970S. Since then, general systems theory has proved to be a significant heuristic in hundreds of disparate research areas. In describing international law from the viewpoint of an autopoietic system (to be defined shortly), this article intends not just to reexamine the foundations of international law but also to help litigators and negotiators make their international-law arguments sounder and more persuasive.

The idea that international law is in crisis—needing the inspired thinking and skilled practice of many kinds of international lawyers to save it—has a rich history in those countries where the enterprise of international law has been most deeply established and embraced. Unsurprisingly, saving international law remains a project shared by many twenty-first-century international lawyers. Such a commitment is certainly not confined to legal academics. Even some legal advisers, counsel, judges, and activists think of themselves as having a role to play in rescuing international law. Being a disengaged bystander while grave hazards supposedly threaten international law has not seemed to be a proper option for many of these professionals who share a calling for heroic self-sacrifice to salvage the ostensibly endangered entity of international law.

Professor Anthony D’Amato’s “Groundwork for International Law” (Groundwork) is an extremely pedagogical project. Despite its apparent simplicity, each rereading reveals a new layer of complexity, reflecting the depth of his lifelong engagement in the scholarship of international law. Moreover, from a certain perspective, his reexamination of the foundations of international law expresses a radicalism that reaches beyond the analysis of legal forms to provoke reflection on the nature and purpose of the international legal system.

A regime’s pitiless slaughter of civilians, particularly in an urbanized middle-class country close to Europe, drives segments of the public on both sides of the left-right divide to demand that something be done to quell the killing. When, as in the case of Syria, the regime cannot be shamed, has financial and materiel reserves and backup funding and troops from powerful allies, and has no higher ideal than self-preservation—when, in other words, it is immune to diplomatic and economic pressure—demands for responsive action quickly translate into demands for the use of force, whether direct or by proxy. and because in these enlightened times the projection of force across national borders is widely felt to be legally problematic, determining an appropriate reaction to the slaughter becomes a task for lawyers, no less than strategists.

Legal regulation of the arms trade has been slow to evolve despite the promotion after World War I of the idea that, for the sake of peace, arms exports should be limited and despite the condemnation on moral grounds of private arms traders who helped to rouse conflict. Article 26 of the United Nations Charter tasked the Security Council with initiating plans for the establishment of a system to regulate armaments in order to promote peace and security and to restrict the diversion of the world’s resources to military expenditure. The extent of this “diversion” of resources is reflected in the estimate that the total value of the global arms trade in 2013 was at least $85 billion. The United Nations’ efforts, which included the public Register of Conventional Arms and a program of action relating to the illicit trade in small arms, culminated in the adoption of the long-awaited Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) on April 2, 2013, which enters into force on December 24, 2014.