In an earlier era, treaties of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation (FCNs) were the primary international law mechanism through which the U.S. government sought to promote and protect foreign investment. Conventional wisdom holds that FCNs are of only limited historical interest, having been...

Slowly but surely, international trade agreements have disappeared from U.S. courts. This Essay provides a concise historical account of this disappearance--which it calls the ‘‘Great Vanishing’’--and explains how and why it came to pass. It first describes how the Trade Preferences Act...