Academic

War on Terror

By Tim Zinnecker

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).

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 30, 2009 (boomark / email).