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The article "Esprit de Corpse: Genocide in the Shadowland of Gaza?" examines the concept of genocide within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly focusing on violence in Gaza. It discusses the normalization of state violence and the complicity of the Israeli legal system in perpetuating it, leading to a lack of accountability for perpetrators. The text also explores the role of language in justifying violence, sheds light on abuses in Israeli detention centers, and considers the legal and moral challenges of prosecuting such actions. Additionally, it touches on cultural and political dynamics in Israel, including dehumanizing rhetoric and societal attitudes towards Palestinians, prompting a reevaluation of international legal frameworks. [Extracted from the article]

In a recent decision the Israeli High Court of Justice, the highest instance in the Israeli judicial system, authorized the forcible transfer of some 1,000 Palestinians from a West Bank community. Much like a biopsy sample, the article draws on its microanalysis of this individual case to expose a malady afflicting the body politic and entire corpus of judicial decisions concerning Israel's conduct in the occupied Palestinian territory. This malady's symptoms are increasingly evident across the global legal order. The proposition advanced in this article is three-fold: first, from the perspective of international legal doctrine, the judgment lacks any foundation, bringing about tragic consequences for the affected communities while offering a farcically inadequate account of international law. Second, the measures employed to displace the community are but an example of myriad legal technologies developed by the Israeli authorities and facilitated by Israeli courts that have fragmented the occupied territory into numerous zones, relegating Palestinians to a "no-place" while Jewish settlers take over their land. Third, while the judiciary has always been complicit in this process, the Israeli High Court of Justice's farcical treatment of international law in the case is indicative of change in its approach to international law. The Israeli court, however, is not alone in signaling disengagement from international law: the withering away of the "global community of courts" is a phenomenon of the times we live in, suggesting both that the cost attached to blatant violations of international law may be minimal and that we are moving from a rule of law to a rule by law paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the subject-matter of a symposium on international law and science-fiction. The impact of new technologies on human rights, humanitarian issues and indeed on what it means to be human in a technological age, suffers from a paucity of international legal attention. The latter has been attributed to various factors ranging from technophobia and technological illiteracy, inclusive of an instrumentalist view of technology, to the sense that such attention is the domain of science-fiction, not of international law. The article extends an invitation to pay attention to the attention science-fiction has given to the man-machine interaction and its impact on the human condition. Placing this invitation in the context of the ‘‘law and literature’’ movement, the article exemplifies its value with respect to two technologies, one directed at creating life or saving it (cloning and organ donation) and the other at ending life (lethal autonomous robots). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory may well have exhausted the international community and exasperated the Palestinians, but it still stimulates the Israeli legal imagination. In 2012, the Israeli government established an expert committee to examine the status of Jewish construction in the West Bank. The committee's report concluded that from an international legal perspective, the West Bank is not occupied territory; the law of belligerent occupation is not applicable to the area; the "prevailing view" is that Jewish settlements are lawful; and that Israel has a valid claim to sovereignty over the territory. This Article, combining a doctrinal analysis with both Cover's notion of 'Nomos and Narrative' and Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions, ' posits that the report is epistemologically groundless and ethically blemished. The committee's reading of international law substitutes an ideology for professionalism. The ideology, resurrecting the long discredited colonialist/Orientalist paradigm, reflects an idiosyncratic utopian vision, one that is simultaneously hegemonic and insular. Consequently, its legal position is methodologically extraneous to the structure of international law, substantively at odds with the compelling commitment of the international community to self-determination, and ethically dystopian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Koskenniemi’s contribution to Realizing Utopia, the first substantive chapter of the book. In it, Koskenniemi locates the source of international legal and institutional projects purporting to bring about world government in an ‘oceanic feeling’ – a primordial sentiment of transcendental unity with the world. Following Freud’s analysis of the infantile nature of this sentiment in Civilization and its Discontents, Koskenniemi suggests that it invariably generates hegemonic utopias. My proposition complements this focus on the failing of uncritical utopianism with a focus on the weaknesses of uncritical realism, a realism that has given up on utopian thinking altogether. It may well be that ‘fundamentalist’ realism, no less than uncritical utopianism, accounts for the proliferation of mechanistic blueprints for the management of global problems, a phenomenon which Koskenniemi rightly laments. The observation that a certain kind of utopian thinking is objectionable need not generate an objection to all utopian thinking. The dialectic between hegemonic utopias and pluralistic utopias, a dialectic that I trace back to the book of Genesis, informs this proposition. In this manner, I further seek to complement while complicating the linear Enlightenment narrative of progress from religious to critical thinking.The paradox is the thinker’s passion and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the decision of the Israeli MilitaryAdvocaté General (MAG) to charge an officer who ordered the shooting of a handcuffed, blindfolded Palestinian demonstrator, and the soldier who executed the order, for 'conduct unbecoming' It advances the following propositions: (i) from the perspective of the applicable international law, the facts of the case qualify the shooting as a war crime; (ii) said decision of the Israeli MAG is indicative of a policy of tolerance towards violence against non-violent civilian protest against the construction of the Separation Wall; (iii) the implication of such policy is twofold: first, it might transform 'conduct unbecoming' - which as a matter of law is a war crime - into a crime against humanity; second, it may well be construed as an invitation to the international community to intervene through the exercise of universal jurisdiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the legal implications of the construction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ or the Court) of the duty to punish genocide under Article VI of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro judgment. It posits that the Court's discussion of the duty to punish is satisfying in terms of what it says and less satisfying in terms of what it is silent about. It is satisfying in the sense that the Court's construction of the duty to cooperate with international tribunals prosecuting genocide as including a duty of extradition, seems to extend beyond the plain language of the Convention and indeed beyond the parties' original intent. It is not fully satisfying because the duty to prosecute remains quite limited. It is further argued that the obligation to punish genocide as established in Article I and the obligation to prosecute genocide as established in Article VI should be understood as two distinct obligations. Article VI merely sets the institutional arrangements for prosecution. Other normative sources support the conclusion that a general duty to prosecute perpetrators of genocide or extradite them for prosecution elsewhere applies even in those cases where the offence was not committed in the territory of a contracting state or when the offender is prosecuted by an international court that has jurisdiction over the state where the alleged perpetrator is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the inconclusive conclusion of its analysis (to the effect that it cannot be determined whether targeted killings are always legal or always illegal, but the matter must be established on a case by case basis), the judgment delivered by the Israeli Supreme Court is important in many respects. Although it inquires into the legality or illegality of targeted killings from the viewpoint of state responsibility, it also takes into account the possibility of individual criminal liability arising out of acts contrary to international humanitarian law, and suggests the dialectics between these two classes of responsibility. The fact that the judgment sets out guidelines for permissible and impermissible actions involving targeted killings provides the condition for investigating the criminality of some of these actions and indeed invites such investigations by the Israeli judicial authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a critique of the 2002 decision of the Israeli High Court of Justice that the Israeli policy of ‘targeted killings’, being a means of warfare against terrorism, is non‐justiciable. The critique, resting on the domestic, transnational and international ramifications of the decision, proposes that that decision is (i) inconsistent with the jurisprudence and practice of the court; (ii) inappropriate in terms of judicial policy; and (iii) ill‐advised in view of the nascent global (international and universal) criminal legal discourse, which encourages domestic courts to subject alleged crimes to their review. Such review gives domestic courts the opportunity to address both the international and the domestic communities, signalling to the former, that the domestic system participates in the global legal discourse, and to the latter, that normative behaviour may well advance the national interest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyzes the legitimacy of representative governments of United Nations member states. Elements in the construction of a legal regime governing the question of representation; Account on the representation of Cambodia; Comparison of government legitimacy between member states; Proposal for determining the representative nature of governments.