The 'law of war' is a paradox, an exercise by turns noble and futile. 'A remedy must be found,' Grotius wrote, 'for those who believe that in war nothing is lawful, and for those for whom all things in war are lawful.' Geoffrey Best, in his magnificent exposition of the modern pursuit of legal restraint on warfare, opens with another aphorism, from Hersch Lauterpacht: 'If international law is, in some ways' at the vanishing-point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing-point of international law.'

LRB 22 June 1995 | PDF Download