WAR

James Q. Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("A pitched battle is something like a trial, and warfare that is limited to battles, even when it is inconclusive, represents a kind of rule of law. Confining warfare to a filed of battle is like confining disputes to the legal system. If two private parties can be induced to submit their dispute to the judicial process, they will be spared a worse danger: that the conflict between them will degenerate into violence. A trial can be a difficult and embittering experience, and sometimes litigation, like war, may drag on; but deciding disputes through litigation is more civilized than settling them though private vengeance. In much the same way, battle warfare is a more peaceful way of settling international disputes than more savage forms of war." Id. at 5. "[W]hen nineteenth-century republics fought wars, those wars spun out of control. This was true of the Mexican-American War, of the American Civil War, and it proved true once again with the emergence of the French Third Republic in 1870. Contained battle warfare was a business for legitimate monarchs. Once new republican forms began to shoulder monarchy off the stage, once war ceased to be a means of the acquisition of (dynastic) property and became a means of spreading new forms of government through the world, war exploded beyond the confines of the classic battlefield. Once war-making ceased to be a symbolic expression of settled sovereign legitimacy and became instead a means of contesting legitimacy, it spiraled out of control." Id. at 22-23. "The idea that just war theory was about 'the recourse to war as punishment' has driven deep roots into our common culture--so deep that is may be hard to imagine that it is mistaken. Nevertheless is is so....As a few fine scholars, especially Peter Haggenmacher, have recognized, classic just war theory was in fact largely about the just property claims of the victor, and it assumed and tolerated rapacious and even savage forms of war." Id. at 101. "High morality is an exceedingly treacherous foundation for the law of war. The largest lesson of the eighteenth century is that it may be better that war should simply be a way of deciding who gets what, when, and how." Id. at 253. "Wars will end more easily if the combatants can all be given something, even if that something is commercial concessions, access to oil, or cooperation in international policing. Wars will end more easily if we can cut deals, and to cut deals you need entitlements that you can trade away. Too much high morality makes it too hard to dicker. The law of war might save more lives if, instead of insisting that wars should be fought only to establish the millennium, it contributed its mite to making deal cutting a little easier. That does not mean that wars should be initiated for gain....But all of our experience shows that wars, once begun, acquire new purposes. We need a jus victoriae to specify those purposes in such a way as to coax our wars to end with as little destructiveness as possible. We need law that defines victory in such a way as to permit a brokered peace." Id. at 261. "Good law is made for the world in which we live. It would be better if there were no wars at all....But there are wars, and the job of lawyers is not to create a perfect world; it is to patch together arrangements we can live with. Wars enter their most dangerous territory when they aim to remake the world, and the same is true of lawyers." Id. at 262. A WORTHWHILE READ FOR THE SERIOUS STUDENT OF LAW AND OTHER INTELLIGENT ORGANISM.).