Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

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...

[Jean d’Aspremont is Associate Professor of International Law, Amsterdam Centre for International Law (ACIL), University of Amsterdam and Editor-in-chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Debate has always been a central medium of thought-making and, hence, knowledge-production in social sciences. This is why, albeit aware of the pitfalls of such platforms (see my EJIL:Talk! post), I initiated, with the help of Dov...

[Ilias Bantekas is Professor of Law at Brunel University in London.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Causality is central in the operation of criminal attribution in all legal systems. It makes sense of course that liability for particular conduct exists where it is proven that it caused the harmful outcome which constitutes the actus reus of an offence. Causation is the fundamental link between conduct and outcome and is as a result the...

[Jens David Ohlin is an Associate Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; he blogs at LieberCode.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Darryl Robinson is to be commended for untangling what has to be one of the most tangled webs in international criminal law theory. The settled jurisprudence on command responsibility is anything but settled; it is contradictory, confusing, and full of conclusory statements and pronouncements that don’t hold water. With Professor...

[Janelle Diller is Paul Martin Sr. Professor of International Affairs and Law at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law (Canada), on leave from the International Labour Organization (ILO). Her views do not necessarily reflect the ILO’s positions.This is the fourth post in the Defining the Rule of Law Symposium, based on this article (free access for six months). The first is here, the second, here, the third here and the fourth here.]] By insisting on clarity in approaching the “rule of law” at the international level. Robert McCorquodale significantly...

might, I cannot follow Professor Robinson down this path. To be sure, there are few scholars whose work I revere more than Kutz and Sepinwall, both of whom bring exceptional degrees of sophistication to a whole raft of issues of great salience to modern international criminal justice. And yet, to my mind, both offer models of individual responsibility that are not available in international criminal justice as presently constituted, precisely because they are not minded to tailor their theories of responsibility to the specific identity of international crimes as they...

[Sondre Torp Helmersen teaches at the University of Oslo and is an LLM candidate at the University of Cambridge.] Stephanie Carvin recently contributed to the Syria Insta-Symposium with a post titled “A Legal Debate Devoid of Consequences (or Bringing Practical Judgment Back In)”. Her call for a practical perspective is timely. The decision of whether or not to attack must be necessarily be a political decision, on which political scientists such as herself may offer sound advice. However, she apparently does not take full account of the fact that international...

[Darryl Robinson is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I am very grateful for James Stewart’s comments on “How Command Responsibility Got So Complicated”. Professor Stewart and I are engaged in similar projects (criminal law theory and international criminal law (‘ICL’)) and immersed in similar literature, so our discussions are always very helpful to me, even though we at times reach different conclusions. Professor Stewart...

...crucial as a moral matter because it promotes minimum world order. Further, the decisionmaking authority that states allocate to judges is not unbounded. It is limited to deciding legal disputes according to laws. It would thus be unethical for a judge to decide a dispute without regard to laws, or worse, based on his personal preferences. But strict legalism, as Professor Howse points out and as I explain in my book, does not exclude moral reasoning about the content of the applicable laws and the practical consequences of applying them...

...do not make fine grained predictions. . . . Our goal is, rather, to give a simple but plausible account for the various features of international law . . . in terms of something other than a state’s propensity to comply with international law. In other words, rationalist theories and my theory try to explain how the international legal system functions or fails. The reader will have to decide for him or herself whether the highly-contextual accounts of international incidents in my book provide useful explanations of decisions and outcomes....

Finally, I would like to use this opportunity to briefly reflect on a broader normative matter. I am unable to determine with certainty whether Professor Trahan believes that, as a matter of lex lata, a rule has emerged to prohibit vetoes by the Permanent Members of the Security Council in situations of mass atrocities. In her response to my post she stated: “I do not believe my arguments are de lege ferenda.” However, in her response to Professor Kevin Jon Heller, she wrote: “the international system needs to evolve in...