[Download] "Striking First: A History of Thankfully Lost Opportunities." by Ethics & International Affairs * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

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eBook details

• Title: Striking First: A History of Thankfully Lost Opportunities.
• Author : Ethics & International Affairs
• Release Date : January 01, 2003
• Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 249 KB

Description

Although much of this roundtable focuses on the legal status of preemptive war, international law has rarely, if ever, constrained governments from initiating hostilities. It may impel decisions to go to war, if the motive is to enforce legal norms against aggression already perpetrated against a third party. But in cases of starting a war altogether, legal conclusions figure mainly as rationalizations or public justifications for decisions made on other grounds. I am aware of no case in which international law has blocked a decision to wage war--that is, a case in which a government decided that strategic necessity required war yet refrained because international law was deemed to forbid it. Domestic law is a different matter, at least in stable constitutional systems like the United States. American presidents usually adhere to domestic legal constraints, if only because they can be removed from office if Congress decides that they have broken the law. No international court or legislature can enforce judgments of what the law requires. What gives law a causal, as distinct from normative, effect is the existence of effective mechanisms for its adjudication and enforcement apart from the relative power of the parties to the dispute. These mechanisms do not exist in the international system, where the parties (states) are themselves the effective adjudicators and enforcers. Crises managed by negotiation are the analogue to settling out of court in domestic law, and war is the analogue to litigation. In real fife, statesmen decide what they believe is right to do, and, in countries like the United States, what domestic law allows. Then they find a lawyer to tell the world that international law allows it.

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