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War Torts: Accountability For Autonomous Weapons, Rebecca Crootof
War Torts: Accountability For Autonomous Weapons, Rebecca Crootof
Law Faculty Publications
Unlike conventional weapons or remotely operated drones, autonomous weapon systems can independently select and engage targets. As a result, they may take actions that look like war crimes—the sinking of a cruise ship, the destruction of a village, the downing of a passenger jet—without any individual acting intentionally or recklessly. Absent such willful action, no one can be held criminally liable under existing international law.
Criminal law aims to prohibit certain actions, and individual criminal liability allows for the evaluation of whether someone is guilty of a moral wrong. Given that a successful ban on autonomous weapon systems is unlikely …
A Meaningful Floor For "Meaningful Human Control", Rebecca Crootof
A Meaningful Floor For "Meaningful Human Control", Rebecca Crootof
Law Faculty Publications
To the extent there is any consensus among States, ban advocates, and ban skeptics regarding the regulation of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), it is grounded in the idea that all weaponry should be subject to "meaningful human control." This "intuitively appealing" principle is immensely popular, and numerous States have explicitly declared their support for it or questioned the lawfulness of weapons that operate without such control. Lack of opposition has led some to conclude that it is either a newly developed customary norm or a preexisting, recently exposed rule of customary international law, already binding on all States.
But this …