Drones at War: An Introduction to the Law and Debate of “Targeted Killing”

Thank you to Dean O’Hear for inviting me to write this month as the alumni blogger.

For the past few weeks, public attention has focused on the President’s decisions regarding the lethal targeting of known terrorists and other non-state hostile actors.  Although the issue may be relatively new to the public, it has long been a source of debate among legal experts in the area of international humanitarian law – also known as the Law of Armed Conflict or LOAC – and international human rights law (IHRL).  The debate largely centers on what is called “Targeted Killing.”  The intent of this post is not to discuss the legality of Targeted Killing itself, but to instead point readers to detailed sources to help readers start studying the Targeted Killing debate or the Law of Armed Conflict more generally.

Without exception, anyone interested in the subject must certainly start by reading the Targeted Killings case from Israel in 2005.  Beyond the Targeted Killings case, there is a growing body of treatment by scholars such as Kenneth Anderson, Laurie Blank, Amos Guiora, Nils Melzer, Mary Ellen O’Connell, and many, many more – far too many to list exhaustively.  One method may be to read one, and then follow up by reading the sources they cite or refute.  The United Nations released a study on the phenomenon as well, available here.

The question of Targeted Killing presents a number of pressing issues in the area of LOAC and IHRL, especially highlighting the tension between them. 

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“Playing Offense from the Center” Urged as a Step to Increase Civility in Governing

Keynoting the annual Restorative Justice Conference at Marquette University Law School on Friday, news commentator and author John Avlon called for those who want to see more civility and cooperation in government bodies to assert themselves.

“You have to play offense from the center,” said Avlon, a columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast and a frequent commentator on CNN. “Part of the problem with moderates is that they’re moderate.”

Avlon told a capacity audience in the Appellate Courtroom in Eckstein Hall that there is more that unites Americans than divides them, but some act like the opposite is true. He said people in both the Republican and Democratic parties need to take stronger stands against those who oppose working with people of differing views in reaching solutions to problems facing the nation.

“Principled compromise is the basis for a functioning democracy,” he said.

Avlon’s remarks were part of the day-long conference, “Restoring Faith in Government: Encouraging Civil Public Discourse,” which included discussions about the state of political campaign advertising, media coverage of politics and policy, and what, if anything, can be done about frequent expression of political hostility in comments on the Internet.

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The Late Ray Bradbury Was No Fan of Lawyers

The American writer Ray Bradbury, author of the science-fiction and fantasy classics Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, passed on Wednesday, June 6, at the age of 91.

Although some members of the American legal profession, like Chinese-immigrant lawyer Michael Yaki, have attributed their decision to become lawyers to reading Bradbury’s anti-thought control novel, Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury himself appeared to have a fairly low regard for lawyers.

There was little in Bradbury’s early life that brought him into contact with the legal profession. Born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, Bradbury was the son of an itinerant telephone lineman. After graduating from high school in Los Angeles in the late 1930’s, he eschewed college (although at least in part for financial reasons). Instead, he proudly continued his own education in the public libraries of Southern California, while embarking on a career as a writer.

Bradbury later admitted that when he first entered into negotiations in the early 1940’s with a filmmaker over the rights to one of his short stories, he had never met a lawyer in his life.

Although he would use lawyers on a number of occasions to enforce his intellectual property rights, Bradbury never seemed to warm up to the legal profession. Lawyer characters appear in his stories only infrequently, and often in unflattering roles.

In his “unfinished” novel, Masks, the protagonist is placed on trial, and his court appointed lawyer enters a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity over the protests and objections of his client.

In his short story, “One for His Lordship, One for the Road,” the arrival of a lawyer is described derisively: “The lawyer, for that is what it was, strode past like Moses as the Red Sea obeyed, or King Louis on a stroll, or the haughtiest tart on Piccadilly: choose one.” Later in the story the lawyer is described as possessing a “great smarmy smirk of satisfaction.” In the story, “Punishment without Crime,” the first words that we read from the mouth of the protagonist’s lawyer are: “It’s all over. You will be executed tonight.”

However, Bradbury’s work suggests not so much a dislike of lawyers as an indifference to them. Usually they appear as the secondary agents of an unwarranted fate. The role of lawyer as lawyer seemed to hold no fascination for him. As he wrote in the foreword to his Mars and the Mind of Man, “Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon.” Theories and writers and iconoclastic rebels clearly kept him awake much longer.

I discovered Bradbury’s work when I was in elementary school in the early 1960’s. He was already a legendary figure by that time, and when I saw the notice of his death, I initially had trouble believing that he was just 91. I associated him as much with the years before my birth as I did Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Fame came quite early, and he lived the last two thirds of his life as a literary icon.

After all, who hasn’t heard of Ray Bradbury?

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