Civil War Time: From Grotius to the Global War on Terror

Abstract

I am deeply grateful to the American Society of International Law—especially to its president, Lucinda Low—and to the International Legal Studies Program at American University Washington College of Law—in particular, to the Dean of the College, Camille Nelson, and to its program director, David Hunter—for their generous invitation to deliver the nineteenth Annual Grotius Lecture. Grateful, but more than a little intimidated. Nobel laureates and heads of state, eminent judges and leading diplomats have given this distinguished lecture, but never, I think, a humble historian. As Isaac Newton might have said were he in my shoes, “[i]f I can see far, it is because I stand on the shoulders of these giants.”