Faculty Bibliography

The rise of international criminal law (ICL) has undoubtedly contributed to the development and enforcement of international humanitarian law (IHL). Yet, there are also important and oft-overlooked ways in which it has done the opposite. By labeling certain violations of the laws of war as “criminal” and setting up dedicated mechanisms for prosecution and punishment of offenders, the content, practice, and logic of ICL are displacing those of IHL. With its doctrinal precision, elaborate institutions, and the seemingly irresistible claim of political and moral priority, ICL is overshadowing the more diffuse, less institutionalized, and more difficult to enforce IHL.But if ICL becomes the dominant lens through which battlefield activity is measured, it is not merely intellectually unsatisfying; it poses a serious risk to the attainment of the very same humanitarian values that ICL seeks to protect. Consider the fact that in many wars fought today, the majority of civilian deaths and injuries does not result from acts that could be classified as war crimes, but from the more “mundane” choices of means and methods of warfare that at most would lend themselves to IHL scrutiny.Rather than diminishing the importance of ICL, this essay calls for more attention to the ways in which ICL is impacting IHL as well as for a stronger commitment by states to the application and enforcement of IHL for its own sake.

May a threatened state use force against armed nonstate actors situated in another state without the other state's permission? Proponents of the “Unable or Unwilling Doctrine” ("UUD") answer in the affirmative, provided that the territorial state in which the nonstate actors are based is either unable or unwilling to tackle the threat by itself. Opponents reject the UUD, arguing that it has no place within existing international law. The intense, multi-layered debates over the UUD have thus far been grounded primarily in the international law of self-defense. Moreover, both proponents and opponents of the doctrine have tended to treat its two prongs as interchangeable, such that the legality of a use of force or the consequences that follow from it are unaffected by which of the two explains the territorial state’s failure to negate the threat to the targeted state. This Article challenges both of these features of UUD analysis. Our first contention is that, while states enjoy limited leeway to use defensive force against nonstate actors in another state’s territory, the prerogative to enter the territorial state without other authorization is rooted in principles of necessity, not self-defense. In turn—and here we reach our second main contention—grounding the UUD in necessity suggests that, for cases in which the territorial state is unable, rather than unwilling, to deal with the threat, the threatened state is obligated to compensate the territorial state for harm caused by its unpermitted entry. Our third contribution is to explain why compensation might be owed, as a matter of equity, even for the entry itself as a (justified) violation of sovereignty. All of these claims, we contend, are bolstered by interpreting international law through the lens of private law, particularly the Anglo-American law of tort and restitution and its rules for the imposition of liability in cases of "private necessity."

In this paper, we examine the actual and potential roles of silence as an element of jus ad bellum treaty law and customary international law. By silence, we mean a lack of a publicly discernible response either to conduct reflective of a legal position or to the explicit communication of a legal position. We focus here on the silence of States and the United Nations Security Council as the primary actors who are positioned to shape, interpret, and apply jus ad bellum. We evaluate how silence has been employed by various scholars in making legal arguments in this field, and how silence may have the potential to affect the formation, identification, modification, and termination of various doctrines. We submit that there is no quantum of silence that has clear doctrinal force. We argue that, at least in relation to jus ad bellum, only certain forms of qualified silence — whether of States or of the Security Council — may be capable of contributing to legal effects. We further contend that, due in part to the nature and status of the norms underlying this field, those forms of qualified silence ought not to be lightly presumed. Arguably, there is a strong, if rebuttable, presumption that silence alone does not constitute acceptance of a jus ad bellum claim. Still, States and other international actors should be aware of the possible role that their silence could play in the identification and development of this field. We complement our analysis with an Annex that offers the most comprehensive catalogue to date of communications made by U.N. Member States to the Security Council of measures taken in purported exercise of the right of self-defense. The catalogue records over 400 communications made since the founding of the United Nations in late October 1945 through 2018. These communications reflect the views of the submitting State(s) on the scope of the right to employ force on the purported basis of self-defense.

We live in a paradox of power: our capabilities of inflicting destruction through military means are unparalleled in human history; yet, for liberal democracies, contemporary military practices are the most restrained they have ever been, at least as far as effects of military operations on civilians go. This Article describes the ways in which laws, norms, and technology have come together to produce the paradox of power. It begins with the observation that the international laws that govern resort to force by states (the jus ad bellum) have had only limited effect on states' initiation or continuation of war, including by liberal democracies. Yet, the international laws that govern the conduct of war (the jus in bello), in combination with prevailing norms and advanced technology, have had substantial effects on how liberal democracies fight their wars. The combination of ongoing, open-ended wars that are harder to fight while complying with contemporary norms of warfare produce a set of unique challenges for liberal democracies.

Effective defenses that are designed to protect civilians in war have significant implications for policy planning, military strategy, international relations, domestic politics and economics. Defenses can increase or decrease overall humanitarian welfare. Surprisingly, existing legal scholarship has focused almost exclusively on offensive action, failing to consider the effects of defenses on the strategic interactions between armed rivals or the humanitarian consequences of defenses. The implications of defenses for the interpretation and application of the international legal rules on the use of force have also gone largely unexplored. We set out to fill this significant gap. We study the operation of defensive systems in both asymmetric rivalries and symmetric rivalries, and consider the interplay between defenses and offensive measures. We analyze how defensive systems are likely to affect parties’ wartime conduct and the potential consequences for the welfare of civilians on both sides of the conflict. A central motivating observation is that defenses have the potential of safeguarding not only the lives of the defending party’s civilians but also those on the opposing side. Our analysis further considers how international law, and especially the principle of proportionality, might affect parties’ choices with regard to investments in defenses. Counter-intuitively, we caution that under some circumstances, an overly-restrictive application of the principle of proportionality might deter investment in defenses, thereby decreasing overall humanitarian welfare. To make our theoretical models more concrete, we draw on several real-world examples: the Israeli anti-ballistic missile system, Iron Dome; the deployment of anti-missile defenses by Japan and the United States to meet the threat from North Korea; and the race between the two Cold War protagonists to develop superior inter-continental anti-ballistic missiles systems, which eventually lead to the 1972 ABM Treaty.

This chapter challenges the status-based distinction of the laws of war, calling instead for revised targeting doctrines that would place further limits on the killing of enemy soldiers. The chapter argues that the changing nature of wars and militaries casts doubts on the necessity of killing all enemy combatants indiscriminately. The chapter proposes two amendments. The first is a reinterpretation of the principle of distinction, suggesting that the status-based classification be complemented by a test of threat. The second is a reinterpretation of the principle of military necessity, introducing a least-harmful-means test, under which, whenever feasible, an alternative of capture or disabling of the enemy would be preferred to killing.

Can we say, definitively, when an armed conflict no longer exists under international law? The short, unsatisfying answer is sometimes: it is clear when some conflicts terminate as a matter of international law, but a decisive determination eludes many others. The lack of fully-settled guidance often matters significantly. That is because international law tolerates, for the most part, far less violent harm, devastation, and suppression in situations other than armed conflicts. Thus, certain measures governed by the laws and customs of war — including killing and capturing the enemy, destroying and seizing enemy property, and occupying foreign territory, all on a possibly large scale — would usually constitute grave violations of peacetime law. This Legal Briefing details the legal considerations and analyzes the implications of that lack of settled guidance. It delves into the myriad (and often-inconsistent) provisions in treaty law, customary law, and relevant jurisprudence that purport to govern the end of war. Alongside the doctrinal analysis, this Briefing considers the changing concept of war and of what constitutes its end; evaluates diverse interests at stake in the continuation or close of conflict; and contextualizes the essentially political work of those who design the law. In all, this Legal Briefing reveals that international law, as it now stands, provides insufficient guidance to precisely discern the end of many armed conflicts as a factual matter (when has the war ended?), as a normative matter (when should the war end?), and as a legal matter (when does the international-legal framework of armed conflict cease to apply in relation to the war?). The current plurality of legal concepts of armed conflict, the sparsity of IHL provisions that instruct the end of application, and the inconsistency among such provisions thwart uniform regulation and frustrate the formulation of a comprehensive notion of when wars can, should, and do end. Fleshing out the criteria for the end of war is a considerable challenge. Clearly, many of the problems identified in this Briefing are first and foremost strategic and political. Yet, as part of a broader effort to strengthen international law’s claim to guide behavior in relation to war and protect affected populations, international lawyers must address the current confusion and inconsistencies that so often surround the end of armed conflict.

War used to be a lucrative business. It was waged as a matter of course to expand territory, convert the religion of populations, resolve disputes, collect an unpaid debt, restore property, or punish another sovereign for a treaty violation. This was not only true as a matter of practical statecraft. It was also the accepted ethical prescription of Just War Theory. The modern jus ad bellum has transformed our view of war: From an instrument of self-interest, enforcement and punishment war has been proclaimed an evil which must be carried out only as a last resort and in self-defense. Yet, in this undoubtedly progressive move, we have also lost something – our ability to articulate the precise goals of the war, and consequently, to determine when the war must end. When self-defense is the only legitimate justification for waging war, every goal must be articulated in terms of self-defense and self-defense, in turn, becomes articulated through an endless array of goals: installing a democratic government in enemy territory, improving child literacy, empowering girls and women through education, enhancing agricultural production, building infrastructure or eliminating all terrorist threats around the globe. While the question of whether a military campaign is justified as a matter of self-defense is often debated, the question of what goals actually promote self-defense remains largely unaddressed. The problem lies not so much in lack of attention; rather, it is that even where a just cause of self-defense exists, the law is inadequate in giving us sufficient guidance on what and how much counts as a legitimate security interest. As a result, we can have no consensual vision of what victory can or should look like. Nor do we have a clear metric by which we can argue about it. In a world of perpetual threats, our existing legal framework invites perpetual war.

In this briefing report, we introduce a new concept—war algorithms— that elevates algorithmically-derived “choices” and “decisions” to a, and perhaps the, central concern regarding technical autonomy in war. We thereby aim to shed light on and recast the discussion regarding “autonomous weapon systems.” In introducing this concept, our foundational technological concern is the capability of a constructed system, without further human intervention, to help make and effectuate a “decision” or “choice” of a war algorithm. Distilled, the two core ingredients are an algorithm expressed in computer code and a suitably capable constructed system. Through that lens, we link international law and related accountability architectures to relevant technologies. We sketch a three-part (non-exhaustive) approach that highlights traditional and unconventional accountability avenues. By not limiting our inquiry only to weapon systems, we take an expansive view, showing how the broad concept of war algorithms might be susceptible to regulation—and how those algorithms might already fit within the existing regulatory system established by international law.

The surge in armed conflicts involving terrorism has brought to the fore the general question of medical care in armed conflict and the particular legal protections afforded to those providing such care to terrorists. Against this backdrop, we evaluate IHL protections for wartime medical assistance concerning terrorists. Through that lens, we expose gaps and weaknesses in IHL. We also examine tensions between IHL and state responses to terrorism more broadly.

We suggest thinking about the beginning and ending of wars as an exercise in risk management. We argue that states, like individual citizens, must accept that some degree of security risk is inevitable when coexisting with others. We offer two principles for the just management of military risk. The first principle is Morally Justified Bearable Risk, which demands that parties at war temper their claims of justice with the realities of an anarchic and conflicted international system. The second principle, Minimum Consistency toward Risk, mandates that states generally not weigh security threats higher than risks from other sources.

In a celebrated humanitarian move, wartime regulation has evolved from a predominantly state-oriented set of obligations — which viewed war as an inter-collective effort — to a more individual-focused regime. In fact, the regulation of armed conflict increasingly resembles, at least in aspiration, the regulation of police activities, in which it is the welfare of individuals, rather than the collective interest of the state, that takes center stage. I demonstrate that many contemporary debates over the laws of war, including the distinction between the jus ad bellum and jus in bello, proportionality, detention of combatants, and reparations for victims implicate exactly the tension between collectivism and individualism in the regulation of armed conflict. I further argue that notwithstanding the humanitarian benefits of the move to greater concern over the human rights of those affected by war, reimagining war as a policing operation harbors real dangers that must not be overlooked. These include imagining more of policing as war, inhibiting military action for the protection of others, and inviting more aggressive acts “short of war” against targets around the world.

This article addresses Frances Kamm's discussion, in Ethics for Enemies, of how intentions should figure in determining whether a nation's act of war is morally permissible. The authors, experts in law rather than moral philosophy, seek to show how certain facets of domestic and international law might pose challenges to Kamm’s argument. They first consider how domestic law addresses individual behavioral analogs to the kind of state behavior with which Kamm is concerned. They then turn to state behavior and the law of war, addressing how the legality of conduct indicates the conduct's moral permissibility.

What does victory mean today? How do we know who ‘won’ the war and what does the winner win by winning? This article uses the prism of victory to view the transformation of the goals, means, and targets of war, and assesses the applicability of the conventional Just War doctrine (through the traditional laws of war) to the modern battlefield. Specifically, the article claims that the military and civilian components of war have grown so intertwined in both the conduct and ending of hostilities that the laws of war, with their emphasis on combat, are hard-pressed to offer a normative yardstick for a just modern war.

International law requires states to compensate victims of war crimes, but not of incidental damage that is lawful under the laws of war. Recently, scholars and advocacy groups have called to expand the duty to repair so as to cover all wartime harm. We inquire into the possible justifications for expanding this duty and test them against a hypothetical expansion of the duty to compensate victims of natural disasters. The effort is ultimately to inquire whether there is something unique about war – as distinct from all other disasters – which demands special consideration.

Technology is progressing in record speed to produce insect-size robots (“spiders”) with lethal capabilities, potentially on a mass scale. Ultimately, “spiders” will enable individuals to harm other individuals from great distances and with little accountability, making people everywhere simultaneously vulnerable and threatening to others. This essay considers the possible effects of “spiders” on the incidence of violence, both political and interpersonal, and how this violence breaks down the traditional categories on which we rely for regulation (domestic/international, citizen/alien, war/crime). Finally, it imagines how our conceptions of sovereignty, international relations, and the domestic social contract between citizens and governments must adapt to this new threat.

Should the United States, as the strongest military power in the world, be bound by stricter humanitarian constraints than its weaker adversaries? Would holding the U.S. to higher standards than the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or the North Korean army yield an overall greater humanitarian welfare or be otherwise justified on the basis of international justice theories? Or would it instead be an unjustifiable attempt to curb American power, a form of dangerous “lawfare”? The paper offers an analytical framework through which to examine these questions. It draws on the design of international trade and climate agreements, where obligations have been linked to capabilities through the principle of Common-but-Differentiated Responsibilities (CDRs), and inquires whether the justifications that have been offered for CDRs in these other regimes are transposable to the laws of war. More broadly, the framework tests the extent to which war can and should be equated to other phenomena of international relations or whether it is a unique context that resists foreign analogies. Rather than offering a definitive answer, the inquiry illuminates the types of judgments and predictions that one must hold in order to have a position on the desirability of CDRs in international humanitarian law, most notably, the degree to which weaker adversaries will be prone to abusing further constraints on stronger enemies, the expected effects of CDRs on the propensity to go to war, who on the enemy’s side is the “enemy,” and what are the duties that are owed to one’s enemies.

In this book, Blum and Heymann reject the argument that traditional American values embodied in domestic and international law can be ignored in any sustainable effort to keep the United States safe from terrorism. Instead, they demonstrate that the costs are great and the benefits slight from separating security and the rule of law. They argue that the harsh measures employed by the Bush administration were authorized too broadly, resulted in too much harm, and often proved to be counterproductive for security. Although they recognize that a severe terrorist attack might justify changing the balance between law and security, they call for reasoned judgment instead of a wholesale abandonment of American values. They also argue that being open to negotiations and seeking to win the moral support of the communities from which the terrorists emerge are noncoercive strategies that must be included in any future efforts to reduce terrorism. (From the Publisher)

One of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law (IHL) is that it recognizes no lesser-evil justification for breaking its rules. Those violating the laws of war will thus be viewed as war criminals even when their conduct was intended to—and in fact did—prevent much greater harm. This Article argues that this deep-rooted absolutist stance undermines the humanitarian drive of the laws of war, and offers, instead, a lesser-evil defense. The argument begins with the obvious analogy to the necessity defense in domestic criminal law, emphasizing the adaptations that are necessary in order to transpose the domestic concept onto the international plane. It then proceeds to test possible first-order accounts—deontological, consequentialist, and institutional—for why IHL might nonetheless prefer a more absolutist stance than domestic law. It finds that none of these accounts offers a compelling explanation for the exclusion of any lesser-evil justification from IHL. The Article then proceeds to develop a blueprint for a humanitarian necessity justification that would exculpate an actor who violated the laws of war in the name of a greater humanitarian good under certain conditions. A central component of the justification, which is required given the special nature of IHL, is a condition that the greater humanitarian good would benefit the enemy, rather than the actor’s own people. Three case studies are taken up to demonstrate the implications of IHL’s absolutism: the “Early Warning Procedure” employed by the Israeli Defense Force in the West Bank, the paradigmatic case of interrogational torture, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Under the paradigm of a humanitarian necessity justification suggested here, the Early Warning Procedure and perhaps even the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (but not Nagasaki) might be justified, but the paradigmatic case of interrogational torture cannot.

The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (‘CCM’) gives the first definition of cluster munition in an international treaty. Under Art. 2 (2) CCM, a cluster munition is ‘a conventional munition that is designed to disperse or release explosive submunitions each weighing less than 20 kilograms’. Cluster munitions present a special humanitarian challenge because they are area weapons designed to easily spread over a vast territory, making it more difficult to discriminate among targets and avoid civilian casualties during conflicts.

The term ‘remnants of war’ refers to the residuum left in a territory after the end of an armed conflict. his includes all the remnants associated with the conflict, including objects such as explosive ordnance, depleted uranium, and debris such as barbed wire and ruins. Such objects present a threat to civilians and slow post-war economic recovery. Although these remnants of armed conflict are often the subject of political negotiations, there is as of yet no general international legal regime assigning responsibility for their clearance after a conflict. Nonetheless, there have been some notable developments in addressing the particular dangers posed by explosive remnants of war, primary among which is the the Protocol on Explosive Remnants of War to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (‘CCW’); (‘Protocol V’).

Discussions of whether Bush and Clinton administration lawyers have acted ethically have missed a fundamental point about the attorney-client relationship. It is the client—in this case, the government—who is ultimately responsible for making policy decisions, not the attorney. Too often, the question of what is “legal” has been substituted for what should actually be done, especially in the United States, where “legal” and “desirable” have become so intertwined. Governments should consult with attorneys, but should also be prepared to implement whatever policies they believe are “right,” and if necessary to explain any departures from what is “legal” to the pubic, to whom they are ultimately accountable.

This paper studies the different roles, impact, and operation of bilateral treaties and multilateral treaties as structures within the architecture of international law. I observe that the preference for bilateralism or multilateralism in international lawmaking is often determined not by an informed choice but by an instinctive association of political schools or bureaucratic affiliations with different forms of international regulation. This association, however, is not always founded on a just appreciation of the workings of either form in various contexts or of the way in which the two interact with each other. I set out to offer a framework for such an appreciation and assess the workings of multilateral treaties and bilateral treaties along three dimensions: the contribution of the respective instruments to the advancement of an international rule of law; the operation of the regime in terms of its effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance; and the democratic legitimacy of the making of each regime. I demonstrate that ideologies and values that seem to be almost blindly associated with one type of regulation may be actually better served, in some cases, by using the other type. Ultimately, this paper attempts to chart a course for more theoretical and empirical forays into the questions of why states join particular types of treaties and how these different types of treaties, or a combination of them, promote or obstruct the attainment of various goals within the architecture of international law.

This book pulls together the relevant ideas on negotiation from law, psychology, business, economics, cultural studies and a dozen other fields to provide a context for successful negotiation. The chapter by Mnookin and Blum provides a useful theoretical framework to demonstrate what a party should consider before deciding whether or not to enter into negotiations.