The twentieth century will be remembered for the millions of innocent children, women, and men who perished needlessly in war or in large-scale, organized extrajudicial killings. More than 170 million civilians lost their lives, many of them victims of “unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock[ed] the conscience of humanity.”
Category: Laws of War
Litigating National Security Cases in the Aftermath of 9/11
The treacherous terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, and the aftershocks that are still being felt years later, have had a profound effect on the legal landscape in the United States. In 9/11’s immediate aftermath, Congress, in a rare and fleeting moment of bipartisanship, gave the President far-reaching authority to combat terrorism.
“Just for Fun”: Understanding Torture and Understanding Abu Ghraib
My contribution to this symposium seeks to accomplish two things. First, I want to engage in a dialogue with Professors Levinson and Kreimer about the problems of defining torture and the law’s response to torture. My contentions are that, contrary to Professor Levinson’s suggestion, we should not seek to limit the category “torture,” and that, contrary to Professor Kreimer’s argument, law in fact fails to regulate torture. More precisely, I argue that law provides less of a constraint on torture, properly defined, than most people probably assume. Second, I want to use that dialogue as the launching point for a more open-ended exploration of torture and the more general problem of state violence. To that end, the last section of this essay considers with broad strokes some of the possible reasons for law’s failure to regulate torture adequately.