Ruti Teitel’s Humanity’s Law

Ruti Teitel’s new book, Humanity’s Law, is an ambitious effort to make sense of the international legal landscape of our post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. Rejecting formalist distinctions between legal paradigms, she sketches out a bold synthesis of recent legal trends away from a state-centered understanding of international law and toward an international legal order in which individuals are the key actors.

What Teitel is proposing—indeed, what she believes is already taking place—is a conceptual merger of human rights law, the law of war, and international criminal law, into the broader framework of “humanity law.”  She takes human rights law’s person-centered approach, its primary concern for individual rights and its willingness to override or compromise state sovereignty, and uses it as an interpretative lens by which to view more clearly a broad array of legal and political developments.

Her book owes an intellectual debt to several sources, including the ground-breaking work of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, and of legal scholar and ICTY judge Theodore Meron.  (Both HRW and the Commission brought international humanitarian law into the human rights fold, in a sense, and Meron did pioneering work in exploring the “humanization” of international humanitarian law.)  But Teitel is more forthright and audacious in her determination to weave the disparate threads of these legal traditions into a coherent whole.

Previous theorists, opposed to such a merger, have underscored the deep historical and conceptual differences between regimes, particularly the disconnect between human rights law’s overriding concern with human dignity and the more instrumental, reciprocity-based motivations for IHL.  But as Teitel points out, events on the ground undermine any rigid distinctions between legal paradigms.  We live in a world in which many situations “cannot easily be classified as a state of war in the classic sense or a state of peace.”  What legal framework applies to U.S. killings of members of al-Qaeda?  To Israeli drone strikes in Gaza?  To Turkish military incursions into northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish militants?  Debates over the applicability of IHL and human rights law to such hybrid situations continue, but, as the years go by, they seem increasingly sterile.  Since reality doesn’t draw a clear line between war and peace, why should the law assume that some distinct threshold exists, beyond which IHL rules replace or supersede those of human rights?

One of the delights of Teitel’s book is its broad and interdisciplinary scope.  In less than 300 pages, Humanity’s Law ranges from Grotius to Habermas, from Guantanamo to Darfur, from terrorism to humanitarian intervention.  It demonstrates Teitel’s encyclopedic knowledge of both domestic and international jurisprudence and her ecumenical willingness to look beyond the legal academy for intellectual guidance.  It is a challenging and ambitious work, one that merits close attention.