War on Terror

Oxford University Press has just released The War on Terror and the Laws of War.  From the introduction:

This book is about commitment, commitment to a tenet that has animated the development of the laws and customs of war since their inception centuries ago.  That tenet is that the authority of war must be tempered by limitations that mitigate the suffering inevitably caused by war.  Many might consider this premise intuitive. Certainly from the warrior perspective — the original source of the laws of war — conflict without regulation is almost oxymoronic, for it is through regulation that the moral legitimacy of that endeavor is preserved.  But as will be revealed in the chapters that follow, the intersection of a post September 11 decision to characterize the struggle against transnational terrorism as “armed conflict” with the law-triggering paradigm that evolved from the ashes of the Second World War challenged this tenet as never before.

The seven chapters are titled What Law Applies to the War on Terror? (authored by my South Texas colleague, Geoff Corn), Targeting of Persons and Property (written by Eric Jensen, a VAP at Fordham), Detention of Combatants and the Global War on Terror (by Georgetown adjunct law professor James Schoettler, Jr.), Interrogation and Treatment of Detainees in the Global War on Terror (by Richard Jackson, the former chair of the International and Operational Law Department at the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School), Trial and Punishment for Battlefield Misconduct (co-authored by Corn and Jensen), Command Responsibility and Accountability (written by New England School of Law professor Victor Hansen), and Battlefield Perspectives on the Laws of War (by Ohio Northern law professor Michael Lewis).

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Thanks for letting us know about this book.

Readers with more than an episodic interest in the topic of terrorism might find some use for my bibliography on same, available here (I'll of course add the volume by Corn, et al when I update the compilation): http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/06/terrorism-select-bibliography.html

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Regarding the quoted material from the introduction, in particular the "tenet...that the authority of war must be tempered by limitations that mitigate the suffering inevitably caused by war:" please see too Larry May's book (one in a series), War Crimes and Just War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Exploring the soldier's code of honor, the principles of a secular natural law tradition inspired by Grotius and Pufendorf (enshrined, for instance, in the so-called Martens Clause that serves as a preamble to the Hague Convention/Regulations), and a Hobbesian-like notion of "moral minimalism," May argues that rules of war and international humanitarian law generally should be grounded on a principle of humane treatment (rather than formal justice) that would trump (or have lexical priority over) the well-know principles of discrimination (or distinction), necessity and proportionality. This involves an orientation around principles of honor, equity, mercy and compassion that entail more than the minimization of suffering ('honor' here supplies the motivation for the three other principles). I think those in the military will find much that is congenial if not persuasive in May's argument. I hope to write a short introduction/review at Ratio Juris anon.

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