Friday, December 20, 2013

New Release: "Law and War," edited by Sarat, Douglas, and Umphrey

New from Stanford University Press: Law and War (2014), edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Amherst College, all). A description from the Press:
Law and War explores the cultural, historical, spatial, and theoretical dimensions of the relationship between law and war—a connection that 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, the remarkable trend toward the juridification of warfare has emerged, 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 into the service of legal goals. Law has emerged 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.

In examining this fraught, contested, and evolving relationship, Law and War investigates such questions as: What can efforts to subsume war under the logic of law teach us about the aspirations and limits of law? How have paradigms of law and war changed as a result of the contact with new forms of struggle? How has globalization and continuing practices of occupation reframed the relationship between law and war?
The Press has not yet posted a Table of Contents, but the International Law Reporter has noted a few items of interest, including:
  • Gabriella Blum, The Individualization of War: From War to Policing in the Regulation of Armed Combat
  • Samuel Moyn, From Antiwar Politics to Antitorture Politics
  • Larry May, War Crimes Trials during and after War