LOAC History

Reflections on the Law of Occupation: Afghanistan and Iraq

Reflections on the Law of Occupation: Afghanistan and Iraq

​A recent  New York Times article discussed, in part, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, raising important, yet underexplored, questions about occupations under the law of armed conflict (LOAC). The article focuses primarily on the U.S. armed forces’ transition...

Embracing LOAC Pluralism

Embracing LOAC Pluralism

​Although the prospect of war remains, the end of two decades of active hostilities affords the United States and its partners the breathing room to rethink their approaches to developing and interpreting the law of armed conflict (LOAC). In my estimation, careful...

Year Ahead – 2022

Year Ahead – 2022

In our look back at 2021, affiliates of the Lieber Institute discussed some of the law of armed conflict issues that made an impact in the past year. In the present post, Professors Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, Chris Jenks, Laurie Blank, Daphné Richemond-Barak, and...

Year in Review – 2021

Year in Review – 2021

The approach of a new year provides an opportunity to reflect on the past year and to anticipate what the future may hold in the next. In keeping with the tradition of year-in-review surveys, we asked affiliates of the Lieber Institute what they considered were the...

Hays Parks and U.S. Views on Targeting Law

Hays Parks and U.S. Views on Targeting Law

Three decades after its publication, Colonel W. Hays Parks’s article Air War and the Law of War remains a key resource for attorneys who advise on targeting operations. The article is noteworthy for its deep exploration of the history of the law of war as well as its...

Welcome to Articles of War

Welcome to Articles of War

Welcome It’s our sincere pleasure to introduce you to Articles of War, the new digital publication of the Lieber Institute for Law & Land Warfare at West Point. In this initial post we’ll share our plans and introduce you to our editorial team. But first a quick...

Francis Lieber’s Living Legacy

Francis Lieber’s Living Legacy

It is an honor to pen one of the first posts for the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare’s Articles of War. This forum provides an important venue for practitioners of the law of war to engage with each other—both domestically and internationally—to articulate...