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A central puzzle in jurisprudence has been the role of custom in law. Custom is simply the practices and usages of distinctive communities. But are such customs legally binding? Can custom be law, even before it is recognized by authoritative legislation or precedent? And, assuming that custom is a source of law, what are its constituent elements? Is proof of a consistent and long-standing practice sufficient, or must there be an extra ingredient - that the usage is pursued out of a sense of legal obligation, or, at least, that the custom is reasonable and efficacious? And, most tantalizing of all, is custom a source of law that we should embrace in modern, sophisticated legal systems, or is the notion of law from below outdated, or even dangerous, today? This volume answers these questions through a rigorous multidisciplinary, historical, and comparative approach, offering a fresh perspective on custom's enduring place in both domestic and international law

Part intellectual history and part contemporary review, The Spirit of International Law ranges across the series of cyclical processes and dialectics in international law over the past five centuries to assess its current prospects as a viable legal system.

Albania ranks among the smallest and poorest countries in Europe, located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas just north of Greece. It gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 (accounting for the fact that a majority of the population is Muslim) and subsisted as a monarchy for much of the interwar period. Albania was occupied by Italy (and then Nazi Germany) for all of the Second World War. Communist partisans expelled the Germans in 1944, without the assistance of Soviet forces, and thus began nearly a half-century of a totalitarian, isolationist rule by an extremely repressive Communist regime under the leadership of Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia. This regime was definitively overthrown in 1991. Since that time, Albania has been periodically wracked by civil and political unrest, leading to substantial violence in 1997 that was quelled only with the brief deployment of a UN multinational protection force.