As gas reaches stratospheric prices and the cost of living continues to climb, war seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. What better time, then, to be joined by Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, to discuss his brand new book, The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice?

The episode begins with an overview of two paradigms in international criminal law. Douglas argues that international law has replaced the “aggression paradigm,” which emerged out of the Nuremberg trials, in favor of an “atrocity paradigm,” which focuses on sanctioning grievous acts of violence, especially towards civilians. However, Douglas suggests that both the atrocity paradigm and the now-defunct aggression paradigm suffer from serious deficiencies. Sam asks whether there really has been an aggression-atrocity shift or, instead, whether the aggression paradigm utterly failed, with a long delay before the separate construction of an atrocity paradigm — which itself proved short-lived. David queries whether Douglas’s story is too formalistic and already out of date. And, fortunately for everyone, we resist the urge to do the entire episode in Seinfeld voices.

Referenced Readings

Humane, by Samuel Moyn
From Aggression to Atrocity: Rethinking the History of International Criminal Law,” by Samuel Moyn
The Internationalists, by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro

A Running List of Nominations for the Canon of American Legal Thought (1975-2025)

A Matter of Interpretation, by Antonin Scalia [Grove]
“A Neo-Federalist View of Article III”, by Akhil Reed Amar [Grove]
“The Anticanon”, by Jamal Greene [Grove]
The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, by Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel [Macey]

In this episode, Douglas proposed co-teaching an international law seminar with Sam. If you could teach a seminar on anything, unencumbered by ABA requirements or Yale Law School bureaucracy, what would you teach?

David: Hmmm… Stoicism: From Marcus Aurelius to O.G. Anunoby. Or perhaps Art History 601: The Art of Walt “Clyde” Frazier’s suits. Or maybe Negotiation 401: How Jalen Brunson Won By Taking Less
Sam: “French Pastry”? I would have listed “Why I Dropped Out of Law School and You Should Too” but then I realized I manage to include the material in most of my classes…