The Birth of the New Justice

Abstract

The Birth of the New Justice explains the history of plans for ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide. Rather than arguing that these legal projects were attempts by state governments to project a “liberal legalism” and create an international state system that limited sovereignty, the book shows that European jurists in a variety of transnational organizations developed their ideas due to diverse motives—liberal, conservative, utopian, humanitarian, nationalist, and particularist. European jurists at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 created a controversial new philosophy of prosecution and punishment, and during the following decades, jurists in different organizations, including the International Law Association, International Association of Criminal Law, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, transformed the idea of the legitimacy of post-war trials and the concept of international crime to deal with myriad social and political problems. The concept of an international criminal court was never static, and the idea that national tribunals would form an integral part of an international system to enforce new laws was frequently advanced as a pragmatic—and politically convenient—solution.