Military, War, and Peace Commons^™

Targeted Capture, Alexander K.A. Greenawalt

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article confronts one of the most difficult and contested questions in the debate about targeted killing that has raged in academic and policy circles over the last decade. Suppose that, in wartime, the target of a military strike may readily be neutralized through nonlethal means such as capture. Do the attacking forces have an obligation to pursue that nonlethal alternative? The Article defends the duty to employ less restrictive means (“LRM”) in wartime, and it advances several novel arguments in defense of that obligation. In contrast to those who look to external restraints--such as those imposed by international human …

Asteroid Mining: International And National Legal Aspects, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

1. Introduction; Asteroid Mining and the Law … 2. The International Legal Context for Asteroid Mining—The Outer Space Treaty … 3. The International Legal Context for Asteroid Mining—The Moon Agreement … 4. Back to the Outer Space Treaty: Interpreting the Nonappropriation Prohibition … 5. Unilateral Action: Title IV, U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act … 6. Concluding Remarks

Asteroid mining is one of the hot topics today not only within the space arena at large but also in the more specific domain of space law, comprising “every legal or regulatory regime having a significant impact, even if implicitly or indirectly, …

Preparing To Commit Domestic Terrorist Activity: Does The United States Have Adequate Tools To Stop This?, Diane Webber

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Special Issue: The Law Of Armed Conflict, Ben Wahlhaus, Hannah Lidicker

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Few areas of international law are as consequential as the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). At its very core, it entails an endeavor to regulate death and destruction both for those who participate in a conflict and for those who are simply affected by the conflict.

LOAC is also of continued relevance. The number of armed conflicts around the world does not seem to be on the wane, and thus there is no shortage of situations in which LOAC remains applicable.

Just as the law retains its consequence and relevance, the study of LOAC retains its importance. Old questions warrant …

Fight, Forge, And Fund: Three Select Issues On Targeting Of Persons, Colonel Dr. Eran Shamir-Borer

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this brief Article, I shall focus on a few specific issues that, in my mind, have particular relevance for contemporary and future armed conflicts, and with respect to which the debate is still ongoing: (a) the notion of "functional membership" in the armed forces of a non-state actor; (b) whether civilians employed in research and development projects qualify as direct participants in hostilities; and (c) whether civilians engaged in certain financial activities qualify as direct participants in hostilities.

We're Not In Beersheba Anymore: Discussing Contemporary Challenges In The Law Of Armed Conflict With 120 International Lawyers, Sharon Afek

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This first-hand account encapsulates the nature of the Battle of Beersheba. It saw uniformed soldiers fight other uniformed soldiers from an organized and hierarchical military. The battle took place in the open terrain of the desert. There was a clear frontline, entirely separate from the civilian life in the nearby town of Beersheba. The battle, and the wider war of which it was a part, was clearly delineated in its start and end. The Battle of Beersheba enabled the Allied forces to break the Ottoman line and advance northwards, eventually beating out the Ottoman Empire and permanently changing the geopolitical …

The Peace Vs. Justice Debate And The Syrian Crisis, Paul Williams, Lisa Dicker, C. Danae Paterson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Peace negotiators often face the difficult decision of whether to pursue peace at the potential cost of achieving justice, or to pursue justice at the potential cost of achieving near term peace. There are abiding ethical and moral debates surrounding this tension between peace and justice. In Syria—where the death toll has exceeded 470,000, 11 million have been displaced, and there are over 14,000 documented cases of torture to the point of death—the peace versus justice debate is a living dilemma with which negotiators are currently grappling. This article strives to examine a timely facet of this multidimensional puzzle: how …

Some Remarks Further To "Outer Space And International Geography: Article Ii And The Shape Of Global Order" By P. J. Blount, Frans Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

Introduction ... The Key Role of Article II of the Outer Space Treaty ... Article II of the Outer Space Treaty and the Commercialization of Outer Space ... Space Mining: The Need for an Update of the Legal Framework ... Updating the Existing Legal Framework: Some Further Thoughts ... Concluding Remarks

The European Union And Space—Space For Competition?, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

From the inception of European integration, a regime trying to regulate and arrange competition as much as considered necessary for the benefit of society at large has been one of the core elements of the European Union’s legal order. While the European Union has over the past few decades become more and more involved in the European space effort, this has so far hardly given rise to fundamental application of this competition regime to space activities, even if space also in Europe increasingly has become commercialized and privatized. The current paper investigates the reasons and rationale for this special situation, …

When Terrorists Govern: Protecting Civilians In Conflicts With State-Building Armed Groups, Mara R. Revkin

Faculty Scholarship

Many existing U.S. counter-terrorism policies, including those governing targeting and detention, rely on an empirical assumption that terrorist groups are primarily military organizations. This assumption may be appropriate in the case of al-Qaeda, but it fails to describe terrorist groups that engage not only in warfare but also in governance and state-building such as the Islamic State, a self-declared “caliphate” that—at the height of its expansion in 2014—claimed sovereignty over an estimated 34,000 square miles and 10 million civilians. This Article identifies a category of “state-building” terrorist groups that can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) the presence of …

The Internationalists: How A Radical Plan To Outlaw War Remade The World, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

Mary Ellen O'Connell researches and writes in the areas of international law and the use of force and international legal theory. She provides a thorough review of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), wherein the authors investigate the investigate the history, nature, and impact of the international legal prohibition on the use of force, focusing on the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Why Federal Courts Apply The Law Of Nations Even Though It Is Not The Supreme Law Of The Land, Anthony J. Bellia Jr., Bradford R. Clark

Journal Articles

We are grateful to the judges and scholars who participated in this Symposium examining our book, The Law of Nations and the United States Constitution. One of our goals in writing this book was to reinvigorate and advance the debate over the role of customary international law in U.S. courts. The papers in this Symposium advance this debate by deepening understandings of how the Constitution interacts with customary international law. Our goal in this Article is to address two questions raised by this Symposium that go to the heart of the status of the law of nations under the Constitution. …

Limitless Discretion In The Wars On Drugs And Terror, Wadie E. Said

University of Colorado Law Review

The wars on terror and drugs have been defined, largely, by what they lack: a readily identifiable opponent, a clear end goal, a timeline, and geographical boundaries. Based on that understanding, this Article discusses the increasingly expansive discretion of American authorities to prosecute individuals where the wars on terror and drugs intersect. Through laws such as the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, the ban on providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations, and the narco-terrorism statute, the United States exercises a kind of universal jurisdiction to pursue anyone, anywhere it believes its laws are being violated. Wielding the power of …

Book Review, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

No abstract provided.

Neutrality And Outer Space, Wolff Heintschel Von Heinegg

International Law Studies

This article discusses the law of neutrality as it pertains to belligerent operations in and through outer space as well as belligerent outer space operations involving the territory and national airspace of neutral States. As far as the latter is concerned, the traditional law of neutrality is fully applicable. Accordingly, international law prohibits belligerents from launching space objects from neutral territory or through neutral national airspace. While neutral States may not provide belligerents with outer space assets or the use of communications infrastructure located in their territories, they are not obliged to prevent their nationals from providing any of the …

Indeterminacy In The Law Of War: The Need For An International Advisory Regime, Ariel Zemach

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Indeterminacy in the law of war exacts a severe humanitarian toll, and it is not likely to be reduced by the conclusion of additional treaties. The present article argues that the adverse consequences of this indeterminacy may be mitigated through a U.N. Security Council (SC) action establishing an international advisory regime and using the broad powers of the SC to provide incentives for states to subscribe to this regime voluntarily. States subscribing to the advisory regime (“operating states”) would undertake to follow the interpretation of the law of war laid out by international legal advisors. The advisory regime would represent …

Individual, Not Collective: Justifying The Resort To Force Against Members Of Non-State Armed Groups, Anthony Dworkin

International Law Studies

This article proposes an alternative to the conventional way of deciding when a State may target or detain members of an armed group. Instead of asking whether there is an armed conflict between the State and the group, this article argues that we should look at the State’s justification for the use of force against the group or its members. In a non-international context, this justification is rooted in human rights law. For this reason, the authorization for the resort to force operates on an individual basis, and the State is only justified in using force against individual members of …

Contrasting Perspectives And Preemptive Strike: The United States, France, And The War On Terror, Sophie Clavier

Maine Law Review

A few years ago, Samuel P. Huntington's article in Foreign Affairs, "The Clash of Civilizations?" described a "West vs. the Rest" conflict leading to the assumption of an essentially unified Western civilization settling "[g]lobal political and security issues ... effectively ... by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France" and centered around common core values "using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will . . . protect Western interests . . . .” Against the West, the specter of disorder and fundamentalism was looming and would precipitate conflicts. This widely …

Unilateral And Multilateral Preventive Self-Defense, Stéphanie Bellier

Maine Law Review

The governing principle of the collective security system created by the United Nations Charter in 19451 is the rule prohibiting the use of force in Article 2(4), which provides that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purpose of the United Nations." This rule prohibiting the use of force was considered revolutionary at the time because it transformed into international law ideas which had for centuries, if not millennia, preoccupied the minds of people …

Legal Formalism Meets Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence: A More European Approach To Frame The War On Terror, Julien Cantegreil

Maine Law Review

Myres S. McDougal, the leader of the New Haven School of International Law (NHSIL), advanced a comprehensive and iconoclastic conception of international law and its goals, one whose continuing influence is well-known today: a visceral rule-skepticism that even his least fervent disciples would never renounce. McDougal’s conception of international law and its goals is fundamentally different from the normativist view of Hans Kelsen, which has been and continues to be enormously influential throughout continental Europe, particularly in France. In the portion of his 1953 course at The Hague Academy of International Law devoted to Kelsen’s canonical Legal Technique in International …

The Importance Of Commercial Law In The Legal Architecture Of Post-Conflict "New" States, Michael J. Stepek

Maine Law Review

In the era of international relations ushered in by the end of the Cold War, nation-building has become all the rage. In a burst of Wilsonian optimism, Western countries have sought to recreate failed states in their own image, fashioning new governmental institutions from the ashes of violent conflict or civil collapse. These projects became possible in a fresh environment of international consensus that has prevailed since the middle of the 1990s. Developing improved legal institutions has been considered a particularly important component of any state-building project and has been a primary focus of almost all such efforts. A new …

The Rise Of Outsourcing In Modern Warfare: Sovereign Power, Private Military Actors, And The Constitutive Process, Winston P. Nagan, Craig Hammer

Maine Law Review

Constitutions are continuous outcomes of power relations. The primary function of any constitution is to manage power, a critical feature of which is the prevention of destructive conflict. Warfare—including its facilitation by failure to pursue diplomatic avenues in some circumstances, and its promotion through the development of technological horrors such as nuclear weapons, mini-nukes, and other weapons of mass destruction—is the foremost challenge to the viability of an international constitutional system. The collapse of the League of Nations provided the world with a stark lesson in how aggression and warfare can undo a weak international constitutional regime dedicated to peace …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, October 2017, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

In this section: Congress Enacts Sanctions Legislation Targeting Russia • United States and Qatar Sign Memorandum of Understanding over Terrorism Financing • Trump Reverses Certain Steps Toward Normalizing Relations with Cuba • United States Announces Plans to Withdraw from Paris Agreement on Climate Change • President Trump Issues Trade-Related Executive Orders and Memoranda • United States, Russia, and Jordan Sign Limited Ceasefire for Syria • Trump Administration Recertifies Iranian Compliance with JCPOA Notwithstanding Increasing Concern with Iranian Behavior

Guantanamo Bay - Why Would The United States Ever Actually Prosecute?, Benjamin Wine

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note examines the legal and ethical dilemmas surrounding the detention of individuals at Guantanamo Bay, focusing on the U.S. government's reluctance to prosecute many detainees despite their prolonged detention. It argues that the indefinite detention, often without formal charges, and the use of controversial interrogation methods violate both domestic and international laws. The analysis highlights the lack of recognition of Guantanamo Bay as a competent tribunal by other nations and explores potential solutions to address these issues.

Autonomous Weapons And Weapon Reviews: The Uk Second International Weapon Review Forum, James Farrant, Christopher M. Ford

International Law Studies

This article considers how military lawyers completing weapon reviews might approach their legal duties if confronted with a weapon system that incorporates autonomous technology or artificial intelligence. The article begins by reviewing current and likely near future technological capabilities before considering whether existing international humanitarian law can adequately regulate these technologies. While noting the widespread lack of compliance with Article 36 of Additional Protocol I, the article argues that, properly applied, Article 36 is an effective gatekeeper for keeping unlawful weapon systems from the battlefield. After assessing the feasibility of a preemptive ban on autonomous weapons based on “meaningful human …

The Conduct Of Hostilities And International Humanitarian Law: Challenges Of 21st Century Warfare, International Law Association Study Group On The Conduct Of Hostilities In The 21st Century

International Law Studies

The International Law Association Study Group on the Conduct of Hostilities in the 21st Century was established in 2011 and held its first meeting in 2012. The Study Group has explored numerous issues arising from the relationship between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law in the conduct of military operations, technological challenges posed by new weapons systems, and the basic principles of IHL in the conduct of hostilities. In 2015, the Study Group established three working groups focusing on core issues within IHL in relation to the conduct of hostilities in modern warfare. These working group topics …

Seeking Justice, Moving On, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Transitional justice measures should be used carefully to heal conflict wounds

International Military Tribunals’ Genesis, Wwii Experience, And Future Relevance, Henry Korn

Utah Law Review

Years after the prosecution of Nazi and Japanese war criminals, the United Nations created an International Criminal Tribunal as part of its commitment to bring to justice persons engaged in war crimes, as those crimes were defined during the WWII proceedings. Ultimately, specific tribunals, organized by the United Nations, were created to bring to justice war criminals. In 1993, a tribunal was formed to prosecute former Yugoslav officials and military personnel for atrocities committed during what is known as the Yugoslav wars. In 1994, a tribunal was formed to prosecute officials in Rwanda for evidence of ethnic genocides. There is …

Examining The Role Of Law Of War Training In International Criminal Accountability, Laurie R. Blank

Utah Law Review

Training and dissemination of the fundamental rules and principles of law of armed conflict (LOAC) is the first step in any process to ensure lawful military operations. A soldier, a military unit, an entire military must know the rules and parameters for appropriate, lawful and effective action during armed conflict. In the same manner, accountability for violations of LOAC — whether individual criminal accountability or state responsibility — is an equally essential tool for enforcing the law. Exploring the intersection between these two endpoints of the spectrum of LOAC implementation highlights how training and accountability can actually work together to …

Finding The Balance Between Price And Protection: Establishing A Surface-To-Air Fire Risk-Reduction Training Policy For Air-Carrier Pilots, Earl W. Burress Jr.

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Currently, U.S. air carriers do not provide equipment or training necessary to mitigate the risk posed by surface-to-air fire (SAFIRE) threats. These threats consist of self-guided weapons (infrared shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles), manually-aimed threats (small arms, recoilless grenade launchers, rockets, and light anti-aircraft artillery), and hand-held lasers. Technological solutions to counter infrared shoulder-fired missiles have been explored, but were rejected due to prohibitive equipment and maintenance costs. A lower cost option, providing air-carrier pilots with SAFIRE risk-reduction training, has not been formally addressed by the air-carrier industry or the U.S. federal government. This effort will use a business concept, the Cost-Benefit …