Sixty years ago, the United States and Britain worked together to create a new world order based on international law. In Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules, Philippe Sands, a British international lawyer and law professor, charts the course by which international relations have shifted from the Atlantic Charter's limitation of force to the the way international law is construed by the current U.S. and British administrations.

Sands argues that the principles underlying the Atlantic Charter, including the limitation of the use of force and protection of human rights, are being threatened. Drawing on examples including the controversy over the Kyoto protocol, global free trade policy, and the war in Iraq, he argues that we are in danger of letting international law become irrelevant.

Philippe Sands has been involved in many of the recent high profile cases in the World Court and elsewhere. He has represented the interests of the British detainees at Guantanamo and the efforts to extradite Augusto Pinochet to Spain and has written for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, taught at New York University and Boston College, and appears regularly on CNN and the BBC.