Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804787420
- eISBN:
- 9780804788861
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804787420.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Comparative Law
This collection of essays explores the cultural, historical, spatial, and theoretical dimensions of the relationship between law and war. This relationship has long vexed the jurisprudential ...
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This collection of essays explores the cultural, historical, spatial, and theoretical dimensions of the relationship between law and war. This relationship has long vexed the jurisprudential imagination. Historically the term “war crime” struck some as redundant and others as oxymoronic: redundant because war itself is criminal; oxymoronic because war submits to no law. More recently, there has been an emergence of the remarkable trend to the juridification of warfare, as law has sought to stretch its dominion over every aspect of the waging of armed struggle. No longer simply a tool for judging battlefield conduct, law now seeks to subdue warfare and to enlist it as a means in the service of legal goals. Law has emerged, then, as a force that stands over and above war, endowed with the power to authorize and restrain, to declare and limit, to justify, and condemn.Less
This collection of essays explores the cultural, historical, spatial, and theoretical dimensions of the relationship between law and war. This relationship has long vexed the jurisprudential imagination. Historically the term “war crime” struck some as redundant and others as oxymoronic: redundant because war itself is criminal; oxymoronic because war submits to no law. More recently, there has been an emergence of the remarkable trend to the juridification of warfare, as law has sought to stretch its dominion over every aspect of the waging of armed struggle. No longer simply a tool for judging battlefield conduct, law now seeks to subdue warfare and to enlist it as a means in the service of legal goals. Law has emerged, then, as a force that stands over and above war, endowed with the power to authorize and restrain, to declare and limit, to justify, and condemn.
