LOAC History
Laws of Yesterday’s Wars Symposium – Reading the Lieber Code as Strategic Lawfare
Editor’s note: The following post highlights a chapter that appears in Samuel White’s edited volumes Laws of Yesterday’s Wars published with Brill. For a general introduction to the series, see Samuel White and Professor Sean Watts’s introductory post. A book launch...
Ukraine Symposium – Negotiating an End to the Fighting
As the conflict in Ukraine grinds on with no end in sight, speculation over the possibility of negotiating an end to the fighting continues. Most discussion has centered on the terms of any such agreement. Issues on the table have included, inter alia, the withdrawal...
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...
Attacking Dams – Part II: The 1977 Additional Protocols
A recent New York Times report of a 2017 attack by U.S. forces against the Tabqa Dam in Syria has sparked controversy and criticism. In Part I of this series, I described reports of that incident and examined the customary international humanitarian law governing dam...
Afghanistan 2021: Reflections from the Stockton Center for International Law’s Workshop
Despite over twenty years of legal analysis, many issues regarding the Afghanistan conflict remain unsettled. At a recent Stockton Center for International Law law of armed conflict (LOAC) workshop, an experienced and diverse group of scholars and practitioners...
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
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
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
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...
Symposium Intro: Hays Parks’s Influence on the Law of War
Most developments and codifications of the law of war have been responses to the evolving character of warfare. Indeed, a timeline of law of war treaties reads like a chronicle of changes in the tactics, technologies, and participants in war. Yet like war itself,...
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
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...