A conscientious reading of the rich historical literature on the American legal realist movement would provide no suggestion that any of the academic writers and other commentators in that movement ever gave the slightest attention to international law. It is entirely understandable that the realists should be remembered as having been concerned exclusively with the analysis and reform of domestic jurisprudence and legal process, because there was only one exception in this regard: the Stanford Law professor Joseph Walter Bingham (1878–1973). Bingham is a figure who has been almost entirely neglected by historians of legal thought, and yet he was one of the earliest American legal commentators to promote an iconoclastic, reformist approach to the common law and American constitutional law. As discussed in this chapter, his writings in the 1910s and 1920s were important early contributions to the iconoclastic, reformist approach to the law that would become a central canon of legal realism. His uniqueness among the realists rests in the fact that he would go on in later decades to play a prominent part in contending for basic doctrinal reforms in international law.

Bingham's career is also of interest in regard to Lawrence Friedman's central place in the scholarship on law as related to historic social, political, and economic processes that have reshaped the landscape of law and society studies (the derivative, successor approach to legal realism). I refer here to the Stanford Law dimension of Bingham's story.