These have been heady times for those interested in foreign relations law. The last twenty years have seen the field transformed. In the 1970s and 1980s, Vietnam had triggered significant attention on constitutional war powers, but that interest was more political than scholarly. Other foreign relations law issues were debated only at the margins. The Restatement (Third) supplied a largely unchallenged conventional wisdom in the area, even if some of its main points were more aspirational than descriptive. The courts had long been missing in action; though they had been active in the first century or so of the Republic on international law and foreign relations law issues, probably the most important Supreme Court ruling in the area from the second half of the twentieth-century merely served to confirm the judicial timidity. On many of the most important issues of foreign relations, sparse judicial precedents (such as they existed) had no more than oracular application to contemporary questions. Other actors nonetheless managed to achieve constitutional equilibria with little help from the courts or scholars. The second half of the twentieth-century was characterized by a remarkable level of constitutional stability regarding the allocation of foreign relations powers.

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