Vandervelde, and the participants in faculty seminars at Stanford and the University of Iowa. Conversations with several leading Judge Advocate General (hereinafter JAG) officers and civilian Defense Department lawyers, whose anonymity must be preserved, proved invaluable. Discussions with Carlos Nino and Jaime Malamud-Goti, while they were prosecuting officers for crimes arising from Argentina's "dirty war," were also very helpful. I am grateful to several members of legal academia who were willing, on condition of anonymity, to share some rather unflattering tales of their own military activities during World War II and the Korean War. Special thanks, as always, to Eliza Willis. The Iowa Law Foundation provided generous financial support. A larger version of the present study will appear shortly as a book, with the same title. The reader of the present Article will, of course, find all of her doubts, criticisms, and disagreements fully addressed in the larger work.
Genocide, crimes against humanity, and the worst war crimes are possible only when the state or other organisations mobilise and co-ordinate the efforts of many people. Responsibility for mass atrocity is always widely shared, often by thousands. Yet criminal law, with its liberal underpinnings, prefers to blame particular individuals for isolated acts. Is such law, therefore, constitutionally unable to make any sense of the most catastrophic conflagrations of our time? Drawing on the experience of several prosecutions, this book both trenchantly diagnoses the law's limits at such times and offers a spirited defence of its moral and intellectual resources for meeting the vexing challenge of holding anyone criminally accountable for mass atrocity. Just as war criminals develop new methods of eluding law's historic grasp, so criminal law flexibly devises novel responses to their stratagems. Mark Osiel examines several such legal innovations in international jurisprudence and proposes still others.
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