Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

[Jonathan Hafetz is a Senior Staff Attorney in the Center for Democracy at the American Civil Liberties Union and Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School . This post is part of our Punishing Atrocities Symposium.] The central purpose of Punishing Atrocities through a Fair Trial is to unpack and examine the enduring tension in international criminal law between principles of fairness, on one hand, and accountability for atrocities on the other. Any system of criminal justice that seeks to hold perpetrators responsible for their violent and destructive actions...

[Ezequiel Heffes is a Thematic Legal Adviser for Geneva Call and a Lawyer at the University of Buenos Aires School of Law. The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Geneva Call. This is the latest post in the co-hosted symposium with Armed Groups and International Law on  Organizing Rebellion.] Although the nature, organization and structure of non-State armed groups (NSAGs) are issues of increasing concern, in particular due to the participation of these entities in the majority of armed conflicts (here, at 19), their...

[Kobi Leins is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne. This post is part of our New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace Symposium.] The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises. In order to reconquer the machine and subdue it to human purposes, one must first understand it and assimilate it. —Mumford, Technics & Civilization (1934) The idea for collaboration on this book sprang out of a conversation on a sunny...

that ought to engage the minds of lawyers and asking, inter alia, that those lawyers develop a better understanding of technology. As she correctly observes, the book may help to phrase the questions we should be asking about technological development. It is for all of us to engage across disciplines when considering possible answers. Markus Wagner looks at Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems and rightly comments that more could have been said in the book about the inherent difficulty in assigning responsibility in complex decision-making systems. He must be right that...

to one of a very small number of books dealing wholly or in part with several individual trials as well as Telford Taylor’s parochial memoirs. The major achievement of Kevin’s book is to provide what none of the other sources can — an overall discussion and scholarly analysis of the entire NMT process in a single reasonably well indexed volume. Among the book’s many valuable contributions are: (1) Identifying the unique legal standing of the NMT, which were neither truly international courts, like the IMT, nor national tribunals. Instead, Kevin...

and cited drafts of the book manuscript in my own work; included excerpts of Linos’s earlier research in a textbook that I co-edit; and blurbed the back of the book with immense praise. Against this backdrop, I want to interrogate a specific part of the book—the chapter on the United States—and, in particular, Linos’s theoretical account of her political opinion experiments. Indeed, this is the key part of the book that tries to get “inside the minds” of individuals and understand the mechanisms for influencing their policy preferences. The experiments...

[Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.] The editors of the rebooted Opinio Juris 2.0 and the International Commission of Jurists are most gracious to hold this impressive symposium on my new book, The Trump Administration and International Law (Oxford University Press 2018). I especially thank my good friend Kevin Jon Heller, who cheerfully looks past our occasional substantive disagreements...

A few weeks ago I presented my book on the Peruvian armed conflict at FIL, Lima’s International Book Fair. The book, “Conflicto Armado en el Perú: La Época del Terrorismo bajo el Derecho Internacional” (“Armed Conflict in Peru: The Times of Terrorism under International Law”), published by Universidad del Pacífico Press, explores how politicized misinformation on the conflict’s history has tarnished the concept of international humanitarian law both in Peru and the broader Latin American context. Before I explain why, though, lets backtrack a little bit. What is the Times...

not a comprehensive review, but rather a series of brief and impressionistic observations about particular aspects of the book. I have chosen to address some of the fundamental assumptions from which the thesis proceeds, and to raise some questions about them, in the knowledge that this will be followed by posts from others, including responses from the author, which provide an opportunity for my views to be challenged and supplemented by comments on different aspects of the book. Tai-Heng Cheng makes his argument in the context of certain recent US...

these topics and the sometimes unsettled questions they present, the discussion reveals an unspoken theme only partially captured by the book’s title. Given its focus, the book is appropriately titled “International Law in the U.S. Legal System,” but the treatment of international law in U.S. law reveals that the interaction between U.S. and international law is not unidirectional. International law affects U.S. law, even U.S. constitutional law, but U.S. law also affects international law. On the incoming side of the relationship, international law produces a range of effects on the...

parents. Intellectually, though, the book is profoundly indebted to Telford Taylor, without whom the trials would not have achieved the success that I believe they did. Taylor always intended to write a book about the NMTs, a sequel to his seminal work The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. Unfortunately, at the time of his death, Taylor had completed only three chapters. I regret that he was never able to finish his book; I’m sure it would have been superb. It is my profound hope that he would have been happy...

The book that Michael Bazyler and I have been working on for over two years, Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy (Bazyler & Alford, eds., 2006) is now available for purchase at Amazon here or NYU Press here. The book has received good reviews (available here) such as IAGS President Israel Charney’s blurb that the book is “an invaluable text for students and scholars as well as a fascinating read for all those concerned with Holocaust and genocide issues in all disciplines and on behalf of all...