One of the earliest and the most famous statements of realism in international law comes from ancient Greece: the Melian dialogue in history of the Peloponnesian War. In 416 B.C.E., the Athenians invaded Melos, a small island in the Aegean that sought to remain neutral and avoid joining the Athenian empire. Thucydides presents an account of the negotiation between the Athenians and the Melian leaders. The Athenians offer the Melians a choice: become a subject of Athens, or resist and be annihilated. The Melians argue, among other things, that justice is on their side. The Athenians dismiss arguments from justice as irrelevant and reply with a statement that many scholars believe represents view: “We both alike know that in human reckoning the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.”

In 321 B.C.E., a Roman army led by both that year's consuls was trapped near Caudium, in a defile named the Caudine Forks, the result of a clever strategem devised by the Samnite general Gaius Pontius. According to Livy, writing some three hundred years later, the Samnites had made no plan to capitalize on their good fortune, and so they sent to Pontius's father, Herennius Pontius, to seek his advice. “Let them all go unharmed,” he said. The messenger who returned with that advice was promptly sent back. “All right,” said Herennius, “kill every single one of them.” Unable to decide whether his father had lost his mind, the son had his father brought to the camp, where he gave the same two pieces of advice and justified each. But what would happen, he was asked, “if they are sent away unharmed and conditions are imposed upon them as conquered, in accordance with the law of war (ut et dimitterentur incolumes et leges iis ire belli victis imponerentur)?”1 That practice neither makes friends nor removes enemies, replied the father. Their humiliation will rankle them until they avenge it.

The inseparability of law and history is manifest when historical interpretation -an integral component of legal hermeneutics-results in juristic disagreement. This article is a foray into the shift from prohibition to permissibility of prisoner of war execution in early Islamic legal history that connects changing legal opinions to changing historiographical readings. Contemplating the contrast between historical and jurisprudential interpretations of historical events with legal implications will facilitate investigation of the interactions between historiography and legal discourse. Exploring a few questions will highlight the ambiguous, overlapping roles of historians and jurists as they construct (legal) histories: (1) Do historical narratives about all the battles that occurred during the Prophet's lifetime illustrate his legal practice concerning treatment of prisoners of war? (2) After the Prophet's death, how did Muslim jurists adjudicate this issue? (3) What legal reasoning did key Muslim jurists of the ‘professionalization’ period apply in permitting the execution of war prisoners? (4) What could explain the discrepancy between the chronologically earlier opinion (prohibiting prisoner execution) and the later, more dominant legal opinion (permitting prisoner execution)?

Over the past three decades, a veritable cottage industry of important new scholarship has emerged dedicated to the history of rights talk in the Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment.1 We now know a great deal more about classical Roman understandings of rights (iura), liberties (libertates), capacities (facultates), powers (potestates), and related concepts, and their elaboration by medieval and early modern civilians. We can now pore over an intricate latticework of arguments about individual and group rights and liberties developed by medieval Catholic canonists and moralists, and the ample expansion of this medieval handiwork by neo-scholastic writers in early modern Spain and Portugal. We now know a good deal more about classical republican theories of liberty developed in Greece and Rome, and their transformative influence on early modern common lawyers and political revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. We now know, in brief, that the West knew ample “liberty before liberalism,” and had many fundamental rights in place before there were modern democratic revolutions fought in their name.

Various students of constitutional law have proposed a negative relationship between the possibility of formal amendment and recourse to informal construction. They suggest that if formal amendatory appeal to the sovereign People seems excessively difficult, a constitutional culture will more readily tolerate expansive interpretations or simple political action as mechanisms of change and clarification. Conversely, if the processes of amendment sufficiently allow the People to clarify or alter their own original charter, a constitutional culture will manifest less willingness to let judges and politicians put words in their mouths. The basic thrust of such constitutional logic is that, where reasonably possible, sovereigns will speak for themselves.

The roots of the international legal order have often been traced to intertwining scholarly and political traditions dating back to the early seventeenth century, in particular to early writings in international law and the rise of the nation-state in Europe. Recent scholarship has attacked this narrative from many angles. One approach has been to reexamine early modern European politics and discourse, in particular questioning whether, for example, the publication of Grotius's writings, or the Peace of Westphalia, functioned as a foundational moment in the history of the interstate order. A second, complementary approach has been to broaden the history of global order to encompass inter-imperial politics, including the legal relations of imperial powers and indigenous subjects. The two projects have been occasionally combined in efforts to trace the impact of imperial politics on trends in international law.

The contemporary international law of occupation, which regulates the conduct of occupying forces during wartime, was framed over the course of deliberations among European governments during the second half of the nineteenth century. The debates between representatives of strong and weak powers on this matter dominated the conferences in Brussels (1874) and The Hague (1899), whose goal was to formulate the laws of war through an international agreement. The outcome, enshrined in what is known as the Hague Regulations of 1899,1 represented a delicate balance that both provided protection for a civilian population brought under the control of an occupant and safeguarded the interests of the ousted government for the duration of the occupation. Occupation was conceived of as a temporary regime existing until the conclusion of a peace agreement between the enemy sides (unless the defeated party ceased to exist as a result of the war, a situation referred to as debellatio). The evolution of the law of occupation in the nineteenth century was a gradual process, shaped by changing conceptions about war and sovereignty, as well as by the balance of power emerging in Europe.

A conscientious reading of the rich historical literature on the American Legal Realist movement would provide no suggestion that any of the academic writers and other commentators in that movement ever gave the slightest attention to international law.1 It is entirely understandable that the Realists should be remembered as having been concerned exclusively with the analysis and reform of domestic jurisprudence and legal process; for there was only one exception, in this regard, and this was the Stanford law professor Joseph Walter Bingham. Bingham (1878-1973) is a figure who has been almost entirely neglected by historians of legal thought.2 And yet he was one of the earliest American legal commentators to promote an iconoclastic, reformist approach to the common law and American constitutional law. His writings in the 1910s and 1920s, as will be discussed further here, were important early-day contributions to the development of what would become the central canon of Legal Realism. His uniqueness among the Realists rests in the fact that he would go on to play a prominent part in contending for a basic reform in international law during the decades that followed.

This article distills several arguments from a larger book project, framed as an international history of the idea of crimes against humanity, with the 1945–46 Nuremberg trial serving as a fulcrum. The project as a whole first traces the origins of the idea of a “crime against humanity,” before this concept was crystallized in the Nuremberg charter; followed by a large central section on the unfolding of the Nuremberg trials themselves; with a concluding section on some of the post-Nuremberg legacies of these ideas. This article draws on material from all three sections, but focuses on how we might understand the politics of the flagship Nuremberg trial itself, as opposed to its antecedents or longer-term legacies.

When former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, gave his farewell address in December 2006, he expressed his dismay at the Bush administration's conduct during its anti-terrorist campaign. The United States had given up its vanguard role in the promotion of human rights, he averred, and appeared to have abandoned its ideals and principles. There have been many statements similar to this one made in the period since September 2001. Even close allies, such as the British government, for example, have called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on the grounds that, as a symbol of injustice, it had tarnished the United States as a “beacon of freedom, liberty and justice.”