This concluding chapter seeks to reiterate themes and lines of argument, while laying a foundation for discussion and judgment about the place of intellectual property in our political communities today. To summarize: the modern nation-state system, powered partly by intellectual property law, is fundamentally an order of obligation, an organization of vast social networks, in which legal instruments with ancient roots performatively link people and organizations together with their national polities into a joint project of economic expansion. The social formation story that I have told in tracing the development of this system is one in which Roman law and Biblical law were drawn together under the authority of bishops and kings to support a very modern, and very strange, adaptation of Abrahamic faith traditions, an adaptation in which faith is placed in legality, and hope is placed innovation. A characteristic set of anxieties accompanies this modern faith tradition, anxieties that our nation will fall behind in the race for innovation, and will lose its fragile position of dominance in a global order of power.

This chapter focuses on the international extension of modern intellectual property, highlighting America's place in a regime of intellectual property that today is global. We trace the foundations for this global regime in international treaty frameworks, focusing on the legal parallels between treaties and contracts, as instruments of legal power. We briefly sketch the twentieth century developments of intellectual property law in the U.S., highlighting the juristic "solicitude" that is shown to intellectual property in U.S. lawmaking and international diplomacy. In the wake of World War II, the U.S. has used its position of global economic power to solidify commitments to intellectual property in a legal framework for trade relations that constitutes a super-national organization, the World Trade Organization, one that has facilitated global convergence in intellectual property law. New dangers and challenges are facing us today, in this globalized legal order, with the rise of artificial intelligence, and with patent claims extending very deeply into the social dimensions of human life, through computer-implemented inventions.