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Origins of Rwandan Genocide by Josias Semujanga (Humanity Books) By some estimates more than a million and a half people were killed in Rwanda during just two weeks in April 1994. In this penetrating analysis, Canadian scholar Josias Semujanga, a Rwandan by birth, examines the social mechanisms, the historical factors, and the "discourse of hate" that culminated in this mind-boggling act of genocide.  More

From Civil Strife to Civil Society: Civil and Military Responsibilities in Disrupted States edited by William Maley, Charles Sampford, & Ramesh Thakur (United Nations University Press) Man without law is the lowest of animals. - Aristotle

The 1990s saw the United Nations, the militaries of key member states, and NGOs increasingly entangled in the complex affairs of disrupted states. Whether as deliverers of humanitarian assistance or as agents of political, social, and civic reconstruction, whether in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, or East Timor, these actors have had to learn ways of interacting with each other in order to optimize the benefits for the populations they seek to assist. Yet the challenges have proved daunting. Civil and military actors have different organizational cultures and standard operating procedures and are confronted with the need to work together to perform tasks to which different actors may attach quite different priorities. More

The Yoder Case: Religious Freedom, Education, and Parental Rights by Shawn Francis Peters (Landmark Law Cases and American Society Series: University Press of Kansas) Compulsory education has always been in the best interest of the state, as it fosters good citizenship and self-sufficiency. But what if a segment of society considers state education detrimental to its own values? More

Common Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism by James R. Stoner (University Press of Kansas) James Stoner's first book, Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism, was hailed as forceful and wise . . . powerful and convincing by the American Historical Review and a stunning achievement by the Journal of Politics. In that work, which provided historical background to the Founding era, he focused on the common law almost exclusively as a mode of legal thought. He now amplifies and extends his thinking on this subject with a study that transcends such formalistic limits and reveals how constitutional law has developed since the Founding.  More

Law and Bioethics: An Introduction by Jerry Menikoff (Georgetown University Press) Ask the average person to tell you something about bioethics and, likely as not, the response will include a reference to Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, or Baby M. For better or worse, the American legal system has played a major role in how the public perceives this field. And it is not merely the public that recognizes the crucial connection between law and matters bioethical. Both leading scholarly bioethics textbooks and major professional bioethics organizations correctly conclude that knowledge of the relevant law is one of the key elements in truly understanding the field of bioethics. More

Statehood and the Law of Self-Determination by David Raic (Developments in International Law, Vol. 43: Kluwer Academic Publishers) The striving of communities for statehood is, of course, an old phenome­non. For instance, against the background of nationalism, the Versailles peace settlement led to the rebirth of numerous States in Europe. To that effect, Butler observes, the Versailles Treaties have been described as the "balkan­ization of Europe"! But there were others, apart from the nationalities who were allowed to establish their own State, who favored the peace settlement and considered it right and inevitable.; Whether or not one agrees with this conclusion, the same forces of national feeling have certainly not ceased to operate, nor have they become weaker in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Indeed, to speak with Cobban, "we may approve them, or we may condemn them, but we cannot ignore them". For an international lawyer at least, the challenge is thus to find out whether international law contains rules and principles regulating these forces and their outcomes. More

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