Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES -- INTRODUCTION -- ONE Critical Legal Studies v. Liberalism -- Two Liberalism and Legality -- THREE The Possibility of the Liberal Rule of Law -- FOUR The Contradictions of Law -- FIVE Law and Social Reality -- INDEX

AbstractGenocide and crimes against humanity are among the core crimes of international law, but they also carry great moral resonance due to their indissoluble link to the atrocities of the Nazi regime and to other egregious episodes of mass violence. However, the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity are not well understood, even by the international lawyers and jurists who are most concerned with them. A conceptual fog hovers around the discussion of these two categories of crime. In this paper, I draw a number of distinctions aimed at clarifying the concepts. I distinguish three concepts of genocide, two legal and one moral, and two concepts of crimes against humanity, a legal and a moral one. I criticize the current legal concept of genocide and, using the idea of discrimination, propose a model for developing a more adequate legal concept and for better understanding the moral concept. I also criticize the moral concept of crimes against humanity, which many thinkers have conflated with the legal concept of such crimes.

The modern liberal state arose as part of a rebellion
against the entrenched hierarchies of rank, power, and
privilege that had characterized the feudal order of European society.
Under that order, a person's prospects in life were determined
almost entirely by his status at birth. The individual lacked the
liberty to change his social and economic ranking and was rendered
dependent on the will of those in higher-ranking positions. It was
against this inclusive, closed, and ascriptive system of inequality
and dependence that the proponents of the liberal state fought.