Harvard Law School pioneered educational ideas, including professional legal education within a university, Socratic questioning and case analysis, and the admission and training of students based on academic merit. On the Battlefield of Merit offers a candid account of a unique legal institution during its first century of influence.

Modern war is law pursued by other means. Once a bit player in military conflict, law now shapes the institutional, logistical, and physical landscape of war. At the same time, law has become a political and ethical vocabulary for marking legitimate power and justifiable death. As a result, the battlespace is as legally regulated as the rest of modern life. In Of War and Law, David Kennedy examines this important development, retelling the history of modern war and statecraft as a tale of the changing role of law and the dramatic growth of law's power. Not only a restraint and an ethical yardstick, law can also be a weapon--a strategic partner, a force multiplier, and an excuse for terrifying violence. Kennedy focuses on what can go wrong when humanitarian and military planners speak the same legal language--wrong for humanitarianism, and wrong for warfare. He argues that law has beaten ploughshares into swords while encouraging the bureaucratization of strategy and leadership. A culture of rules has eroded the experience of personal decision-making and responsibility among soldiers and statesmen alike. Kennedy urges those inside and outside the military who wish to reduce the ferocity of battle to understand the new roles--and the limits--of law. Only then will we be able to revitalize our responsibility for war.

The Law of Armed Conflict provides a complete operational scenario and introduction to the operational organization of United States forces. The focus remains on United States law perspective, balanced with exposure to areas where the interpretation of its allied forces diverge. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello issues are addressed at length. The casebook comes to students with stunning authority. All of the authors are active or retired United States Army officers with more than 140 years of collective military operational experience among them. Several have experience in both legal and operational assignments as well. They deliver a comprehensive coverage of all aspects of the law of armed conflict, explaining the difference between law and policy in regulation of military operations.

Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial with a lawful verdict. And when this contained form of battle ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. The Verdict of Battle explains why the ritualized violence of the past was more effective than modern warfare in bringing carnage to an end, and why humanitarian laws that cling to a notion of war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts. Belief that sovereigns could, by rights, wage war for profit made the eighteenth century battle’s golden age. A pitched battle was understood as a kind of legal proceeding in which both sides agreed to be bound by the result. To the victor went the spoils, including the fate of kingdoms. But with the nineteenth-century decline of monarchical legitimacy and the rise of republican sentiment, the public no longer accepted the verdict of pitched battles. Ideology rather than politics became war’s just cause. And because modern humanitarian law provided no means for declaring a victor or dispensing spoils at the end of battle, the violence of war dragged on. The most dangerous wars, Whitman asserts in this iconoclastic tour de force, are the lawless wars we wage today to remake the world in the name of higher moral imperatives.

Motions shape the battlefield of courtroom practice. Whether providing advanced knowledge of the admissibility of alleged prior bad acts by a client or seeking a ruling on a proposed panel instruction, motions in military practice are instrumental in preparing for the war of a court-martial trial. Failing to approach motions practice as a pivotal step in shaping the battlefield for the war of a court-martial trial does a disservice to one's client. This book dares you to step away from the "shared drive" and instead to take a fresh approach with each motion for every case. I have dissected my own process and am providing the insight that I derived for your benefit in the form of this book. My law firm's mantra is that we want to be where we can do the most good. My goal for this book is the same: to elevate the practice. One motion at a time.

Armed non-state actors (ANSAs) often have economic aims that international law needs to respond to. This book looks at the aim of Islamic State to create an effective government, with an economically independent regime, which focused on key oilfields in Syria and Iraq. Having addressed Islamic State's quest for energy resources in Iraq and Syria, the book explores the lawfulness of the war with Islamic State from a variety of legal aspects. It has been attempted to make inroads into the most controversial aspects of contradictions in the application of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, particularly when discussing the use of extraterritorial armed force against ANSAs, and the obligation to protect civilian objects, including the natural environment. The question is whether the targeting of energy resources should be regarded as a violation of the laws of armed conflict, even though the war with Islamic State being classified as a non-international armed conflict. Ambitious in scope, the study argues that legal theory and state practice are still problematic as to how and under what conditions states can justify resorting to military force in foreign territory, and to what extent they can target natural resources as being part of state property. Furthermore, it goes on to examine the differences between international and non-international armed conflicts, to establish whether there is any difference in the targeting of energy resources as part of the war-sustaining capabilities of either party. Through an examination of the Islamic State case, the book offers a comprehensive study to close the gaps in jus in bello by contextualising the questions of civilian protection, victimisation and state responsibility by evaluating the US's war-sustaining theory as a justification for the destruction of a territorial state's natural resources that are occupied by ANSAs.