Book Reviews


	Print or Email This Page May 2010, Page 55 *Book Reviews* By *Scott T. Johnson* The Oxford Companion To International Criminal Justice Antonio Cassese, Editor-in-Chief Oxford (2009) AND Military Commission Reporter, Volume 1 (Oct. 17, 2006 – June 1, 2009) National Institute of Military Justice (2009) Reviewed by Scott T. Johnson For individuals interested in international criminal law (“ICL”) or the U.S. Department of Defense Military Commissions, two important compilations of decisions and essays recently have been published. The Oxford Companion to International Criminal Justice is the brainchild of Antonio Cassese, an Italian academic and leading thinker in international criminal law. Formerly a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, he is now president of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The Companion is divided into three discrete sections. Section one, organized thematically, consists of numerous short essays on different ICL questions. Written primarily by European- and North American-based academics and practitioners of ICL, these essays examine areas defense lawyers should be conversant in when practicing before international tribunals. Also, they will provide helpful background when thinking about domestic criminal defense cases in which issues of war crimes, human rights abuses, and terrorism arise. Essay topics include state responsibility and individual criminal liability, the sources and general principles of ICL, gender-related violence, and comparative criminal law (which I believe U.S. lawyers should incorporate more into their legal practices). These essays provide tutorials that are particularly helpful to lawyers who never took a course on international or human rights law. Keywords in these essays are listed in bold and summaries of these keywords can be found in the other two sections of the book. Section two has 320 entries in alphabetical order that cover major legal issues in ICL, the ICL institutions, and the people who were significant participants in ICL proceedings over the years. Section three contains 420 case summaries that represent a selection of all the major cases (national and international) concerning all aspects of ICL up to April 2008. While many of these decisions appear in English for the first time, others have not been published before. This book is a must-have encyclopedia for practitioners of international criminal law and, I argue, any defense lawyer. The reality of the hybridization of law will only grow in the future, making it imperative that domestic lawyers are aware of these international and foreign legal trends and developments. Moreover, this book provides a quick reference source for academics that need summaries of significant cases, trials, people, and events in the history of ICL. A second useful new compilation, the Military Commission Reporter, contains every publicly available decision, order, and ruling issued by the military commissions conducted at the U.S. Naval Base, Guant�namo Bay, Cuba, as well as all known substantive opinions and rulings by the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review from October 2006 through June 1, 2009. The National Institute of Military Justice should be commended for making these decisions and rulings available to lawyers and the public. The Reporter provides a behind-the-curtain view of the proceedings that gained so much attention in the Supreme Court cases regarding the constitutionality of the military commissions in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush. Not only does the Reporter give insights into the workings of the legal proceedings against the detainees, it confirms the practices of coercion and torture at Guant�namo. In her preface, Patricia M. Wald, a retired D.C. Circuit Court judge and judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, expresses her disappointment that few if any references to decisions by international courts on similar issues were included in the rulings by the commission’s judges. However, Judge Wald also points out that these decisions are a testament to the defense counsel, both military and civilian, who have fought so hard for their demonized clients’ rights in the military commissions process where the rules are radically skewed against the possibility for adequate due process and fair trials. Hopefully, the next generation of military commissions under the Obama administration will demonstrate to the world that the U.S. government can provide detainees with fair trials. Defense attorneys will be well-served if they can push the legal analysis in their clients’ cases to the next level – a level at which the commission’s judges would be forced to examine the decisions reached during the past 15 years at the international ad hoc courts for Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Lebanon, and the permanent International Criminal Court. Criminal defense lawyers ready for the 21st century’s changes and challenges to the legal landscape should have both the Companion and the Reporter on their reference shelves. The Guant�namo Lawyers Mark P. Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz, Editors New York University Press (2009) Reviewed by Tyler D. Helmond The historian Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson once said, “As important as the World Trade Center was for those 30 years that it existed, or almost 30 years … in some ways it’s more important to history now that it’s gone. … Millions and hundreds of millions of people around the world are changing the way they live because of what happened at the World Trade Center.” In keeping with Dr. Jackson’s prediction, the decade following the events at the World Trade Center has seen many changes in the way millions of people live. It has also seen lawyers struggle over a new application of the principles of due process in a changing world. The Guant�namo Lawyers was meant as a history book. Its editors, Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux and ACLU attorney Jonathan Hafetz, started the project after a discussion contemplating how history would view the incarceration of “enemy combatants” at the Guant�namo Bay Naval Base. The title of the book describes the journalists used for this project – lawyers – rather than the intended subject. The book is a compilation of narratives from over 100 attorneys describing the lives and experiences of the detainees. The editors did not intend to glorify the lawyers who participated in the representation of the detainees, but rather to explain, and to preserve for history, the full range of people and circumstances involved in the Guant�namo Bay detention. In fact, some lawyers intimately involved in the representation of the detainees did not participate in the project, fearing that the story of the lawyers would overshadow the circumstances of the detainees. The book does an excellent job portraying the deplorable conditions at the base and the challenges for the detainees. But, intended or not, one is left with an incredible sense of pride and admiration to read about the character, integrity, and courage of the lawyers who were involved in representing the detainees. The Guant�namo lawyers were volunteers spanning all sorts of different practices and practice settings, and each lawyer had a unique experience in confronting the challenges to representing people linked to the events of September 11, 2001. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, was involved in the filing of one of the first petitions on behalf of the detainees. He eloquently recalled the internal debate in his office about the decision to proceed with representing the detainees. Ratner was an eyewitness to the attacks, and the Center for Constitutional Rights office was located near the World Trade Center. Ratner and his staff set aside their emotions and risked the private funding of their not-for-profit organization to help guarantee the constitutional right to due process. Many of the contributors to this book shared the experience of being denounced by the Bush administration and popular media. Several received hate mail, and government officials urged corporate clients to abandon firms that had helped sponsor the representation of detainees through pro bono departments. The most compelling reason to read The Guant�namo Lawyers is that the legal questions created by Guant�namo have not yet been fully resolved. President Obama’s promise to close the prison has so far gone unfulfilled, and John Paul Stevens, who will perhaps be remembered more for his writings on Guant�namo than any other subject, will leave the Court at the end of this term. No matter how the Guant�namo question is resolved, historians will no doubt benefit from Denbeaux and Hafetz’s excellent book. A companion digital archive with complete works from each of the lawyers is available through the New York University Press.
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