This paper examines Judith Shklar’s Legalism in light of the paradox that emerges clearly from a law-based approach to international crises that ought to be evaluated on the basis of whether the judicial initiative—the cases examined are primarily drawn from ad hoc UN Security Council tribunals—promote, in Shklar’s words, “decent politics.” The question of whether this notion is exclusively related to liberalism, and whether it may run contrary to the role of defense counsel in such trials—deepl…
Read moreThis paper examines Judith Shklar’s Legalism in light of the paradox that emerges clearly from a law-based approach to international crises that ought to be evaluated on the basis of whether the judicial initiative—the cases examined are primarily drawn from ad hoc UN Security Council tribunals—promote, in Shklar’s words, “decent politics.” The question of whether this notion is exclusively related to liberalism, and whether it may run contrary to the role of defense counsel in such trials—deeply anchored in the liberal tradition of the protection of individual liberty, and yet confronted to the politics of international criminal law and international relations, however theorized—is fundamental, as “decent politics” compete with the legalistic imperatives of the defense, and the liberal foundation of the legal systems from which UN trials have emerged. Legalism provides a theoretical thread to examine the emergence of international criminal trials as well as the relation between the universality of law and history and the politics of memory, which figure prominently as political phenomena in these trials, but which may run contrary to the liberalism inherent in the legalist form.