Speaker 1:	Well it's really remarkable to be back here and graduate from here twenty-nine years ago. And a lot has changed in the world and some things maybe have not changed all that much in the world. And so I wanted to talk about some of the work I do relating to international law and questions of state sovereignty. In light in some ways the kinds of experiences that I had when I was a political activist here back in the early 1980s. Talking to people now about the 1980s would've been talking about the 1950s when I was here. 
	This is really a little bit mind blowing but back when I was here, there was an interesting moment of resurgence of the cold war. We had the election of Ronald Regan as president in 1980. And the view taken by people in the Regan administration was that the embrace of human rights by the Carter administration had affectively disarmed the United States in the cold war. That by incorporating some sort of moralism into the approach into US foreign policy, that the United States had debilitated itself in the global struggle against communism. And it took the position that in a way is reflected in the Dick Cheney line about the global war on terrorism that we need to go to the dark side.
	So the Regan administration, which has this odd reputation in retrospect as having been all about freedom, and having been all about representing a moral clarity. In fact quite self consciously was about ruthlessness. It was about the pursuit about the project of anti communism around the world that entailed arming any force that would be at odds with any foreseen as being connected to our geo strategic foes, particularly the Soviet Union and Cuba. And so when the Regan administration came to office in 1981, job one was to draw the line against communism in Latin America. This was my freshman year in college and oriented not only the four years of my college education but much of the rest of my life actually.
	I still travel to Nicaragua from time to time, as sort of residue of the kinds of struggles that I became involved with from that moment. Difficult to really bring home to people what a kind of projection of US power in the name of a kind of righteous defense of freedom really meant in those days. But what it meant was of a, in fact of a willingness to support remarkable levels of savagery in a number of countries around the world. Even in the most cynical ways. The Regan administration, of course, had as it's hallmark anti communism and what it did was to supply the Khmer Rouge Gorillas who had been displaced from power by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. People who had been responsible for millions of deaths in Cambodia, who where the worst communists there ever where in some sense. And the Regan administrations project of power extended to the idea of supporting those forces.
	But closer to home they, it entailed specifically support the Salvadorian military and supporting counter revolutionary guerillas really organizing counter to a large extent, counter revolutionary guerillas fighting against the government of Nicaragua that had come to power in 1979 in the revolution. 
	So I threw myself, in those days, into political activism, political education about these sorts of issues. And I continued to work on these questions when I was at Hartford Law School but I always thought of them as political questions and not particularly as legal questions. And it was a rather remarkable thing the occurred at that time, which was that Nicaragua actually among other things, sued the United States in the international court of justice in the mid 1980s. 
	And it sued the United States actually with the help of a former legal advisor to the US state department, Abraham [Chase 00:04:27], was the at that part professor of international law at Harvard Law School. He was the lead council for the Nicaraguans in this. And my reaction to this was, "Oh that's all very nice." It's a little bit like getting Cambridge Massachusetts declared a nuclear free zone. But the idea of bringing a legal case against the United States of America in the international court of justice in the HEG seem like about the farthest thing in the world form a plausible political strategy to do something about Regan administration backing of murderous counter revolutionary guerillas in a small country. The real issues where going to be political issues and to try to advocate on the basis of the policy being a violation of international law, was in some ways even worse politically than trying to evoke the idea of human rights. Because human rights at least had a kind of moral currency that could be evoked for these purposes that even the Regan people as much as they distorted human rights discourse could entirely dispar it.
	But international law seemed as thought it was, in kind of terms in which responsible people who understood the responsibilities of American power simple wouldn't speak. The idea that the United States would be restrained by international law as opposed to some more abstract conception of ethics simply would not have any currency. And I think actually as the politics played out in the midi 1980s that was probably true. 
	The ICJ did hold against the United States in Nicaragua vs the United States. Land mark decision. A really remarkable moment, actually, in the national legal order. Where this court that's so dependent upon states for its very being and its support. A court that was encountering the probability of being defied in its order by the most powerful nation on Earth. None the less, through down the gauntlet made clear that from the stand point of international law US policy in Nicaragua was a violation.
	The response to the in the United States was kind of a yawn. In fact right at that moment the congress, which had resisted for some years, military assistance to the confers actually approved 100 million dollars of military aid to the contras. So at that particular moment, which is sort of the lowest point of my life from the stand point of political activism. One's despair could hardly be in any way mitigated by the sense that this victory had been won in the international court of justice.
	What I think many of us didn't realize at the time was from the stand point of the rest of the world, what the court of international court of justice says isn't so irrelevant. And that there was a remarkable sense, particularly with in Latin American region more broadly, that violations of international law, in and of themselves, where relevant to the security of the region. That even Latin American governments and parts of Latin American societies that were not sympathetic to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. That were sympathetic in general to the United States and it's geo strategic vision, none the less thought there was something really bad about the United States transgressing these norms of international law upon which the security of nations depends. 
	And so it turns out that diplomacy from the United States in the next few years after the ICJ ruling was very much complicated. And indeed there were a whole series of factors that brought about a curtailment of the Regan administration's policy toward Nicaragua. But the role of the ICJ judgment against the United States actually was, if not in any sense, a decisive move. And not in any sense a real road block in itself to US decision making. Contributed to global conditions that made it much more difficult for the Regan administration to engage in this practice.
	And so I came to realize after my brief period as a commercial litigator, not something I like to talk about with great pride. Particularly back here at [Swarthmore 00:09:00], I always have my tail between my legs when I come back here for alumni events and, "What do you do? You work for a law firm?" 
	But when I went back to school after that, I focused on international law, and focus on the relationship between international and domestic authority. And was concerned with the question of how international law works in favor of weak states to defend their fundamental interest in situation internationally that's very much rigged against them as far as power is concerned. We have an international system with enormous disparities of power disparities, disparities of values, and moral principles. And yet we also have, to a much greater extent than people appreciate, a certain consensus of basic ground rules of the international structure that do in fact establish a principle of sovereign equality. One that provides a certain core minimum core privileges and immunities on behalf of states large and small. 
	There's no sense in which there is equality in the world between the United States and Nicaragua but in this particular regard of having this special clusters of rights, obligations, powers, and immunities on an equal basis with all other states. Nicaragua had standing against the United States and other parts of the international system had reason to stand by Nicaragua in defense of a particular conception of global order. Conception of global order that's not in any way a sort of wide ranging and it's concerns for social justice. Not in any way directed toward the fundamental redistribution of resources and power in the international system. But one that serves as a frame work of accommodation among people who are differently situated in the international system and a frame work of accommodation that serves in the long term the interests of different parts of the political community international, serves indeed the long term interest of powerful states who require frame work of cooperation going forward. And who have all sorts of power and to be unilaterally implemented through [corortion 00:11:24] and violence but who find it quite costly in fact to try to maintain their position in those terms and actually need frame works of accommodation.
	And so international law turns out to be more important in the world order than I thought it was back when I was here and back when I was in Harvard Law School in the 1980s. And so I want to talk about how international law operates with respect to some of the hard questions in the international system. The book that I've written is 'Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement' and it is an attempt to give an account of the relationship between domestic and international legal authority. In an abstract way, in some respect, but also as applied to a whole series of problems that are front and center in the concerns of people who have consideration about ethical problems about international affairs. Successions and coos the creations of new states and the over through of governments, questions about humanitarian invention, and questions about international criminal justice.
	I find myself in sort of an odd position of addressing these kinds of questions, because it turns out that there's a lot of fashionable rhetoric these days about international law that seems to understand international law as itself the pursuit of justice and perhaps a substitute for the pursuit of justice with in states as a kind of device by which people can be globally held accountable when they're not held accountable by the politics of their own country. And that's particularly seductive for many of my colleagues at this particular moment with the global war on terrorism, because we have had a whole series of remarkable transgressions of international standers in many respects in the global war on terrorism. And we've had remarkable attempts to rationalize in the name of law some of these sorts of tactics and we've seen a spade of legal memoranda that have spewed forth and tried to rationalize evading international legal standers and made people think that the authors of those legal memoranda actually ought to be on trial somewhere for their aiding and abetting but where really crimes of the global war on terrorism. That were acts of torture acts of extraordinary rendition violations of the Geneva Convention. 
	And it wouldn't it be nice to put you know, maybe Dick Cheney or David Addington his council or right hand man. Or John Yoo the author of the notorious torture memoranda, wouldn't it be nice to put these people on trial and hold them accountable. In fact isn't international law all about ending impunity to make sure that everyone understands that they are subject to and everywhere and anyways applicable body of law. No one is above the law and if people are above the law with in their own state well at least there's an international legal order. So let's get these people and what we can do is actually get filed criminal cases against these people and courts all over the world on theatrical universal jurisdiction. And we can reach out and touch these people. We can actually maybe get arrest warrants issued for Dick Cheney, or for any number of these folks. And that sounds like a seductive idea and what I want to say to my colleagues who think in these terms is, "Get real."
	It's true that in principle there is frame work that exist that makes it possible to do this. It's also true that that meets the limits of the capacity of the international legal order in practice. That there's no way that these kinds of devices are going to be used against states that are as powerful and influential as the United States. However by focusing on these kinds of aspects of the international system and giving them disproportionate rate, one might actually undermine the most fundamentally protected aspects of the international order. Because the effort to globalize justice in this way, seems to put a premium on the idea of no safe havens, no impunity, peace being only achieved through justice. Justice understood not in distributive terms as we used to understand it. When we used to say, "No peace without justice," thirty years ago but now people talk about no peace without attribute justice.
	And that really sort of struck a chord with me in part because of my experiences and dealing with the issues that we dealt with tin the 1980s and ever since. The problem with focusing on non impunity is that if you believe that an international legal structure of accommodation among people with different interests, different levels of power, and also different moral principles. You need to actually establish a system where there will be impunity of a sort. Where empowered self righteousness. Where the capacity to exercise corrosion force and violence across boarders is constrained even where people think they have an immorally good reason. And if anti impunity comes to replace the other principles of the international order, people start fixating on the concept of justice in international law at the expense of the idea of accommodation, and imploralism, and sovereign equality. 
	The reality is not going to be the ah we're finally going to get the Dick Cheneys of the world and the dot. It is I fear we would actually create a situation in which international law would be turned into the ally of those who want to self righteously exercise power across boarders. And the people who are in a position to do this are not the people you want to have do it. A lot of the problem in the way that these issues are discussed in international ethics is- stems from the fact that people are thinking about, "Well what should do faced with these terrible things going on across boarders and other states." You know. Shouldn't we help? Shouldn't we intervene? But the difficulty, with this from the stand point of international law, is that international law cannot actually generate the political will to do the right thing. And international law is about a system of law that bridals states as they actually are and states that operate on the logic that they actually have. Not with standing all of the wonderful rhetoric of responsibility to protect that comes out of the UN these days. 
	The fact is that any protection that's going to be done in truly extraordinarily way across boarders by the use of force, is only going to occur where there's a confluence of interest between humanitarian considerations and the self interested agendas of particular states. And we can't count on that occurring systematically. Indeed there maybe be a confluences of particular circumstances but we need a legal order that can actually structure these matters and see to it that empowered self righteousness is not the normal in the international system but that states are protected in the fundamental immunities from certain types of gruff boarder exercises of power that violates the basic terms of accommodation.
	So that is what inspires both an article that I wrote called 'Come to Terms with Ruthlessness' which then reappears as a chapter of this book. But also the sovereign equality book more generally. What I wanted to do was try to lay out a moral case for the most unpopular things about international law. That is to say a moral case for the regard that the international law has for state sovereignty. Keeping in mind always that we are talking about the sovereignty of weak states. 
	The United States doesn't need sovereignty in the sense of sovereign equality of the international law. The United States can take care of itself without anyone having to feel restrained visa these United States by the concerns of the legal prerogatives of the United States, the political prerogatives of the United States far out weigh the legal prerogatives of the United States. But weak states have an important interest. So what I want to talk about is a little, some of the things I laid out on the out line. I won't go through the outline entirely but I wanted you to have sort of the basic structure of the logic of the claims that I'm making here. And I start with Immanuel Kant, who is often seen as a kind of supreme moralist and yet who understood that political order was a different thing fundamentally form making individual determinations about right conduct. And he said, "If we imagine men to be ever so good natured and righteous before a public lawful state of society as established. Individual men nations and states can never be certain that they are secure against violence from one another, because each will have his own right to do what seems just and good to him. Entirely independent of the options of others."
	And so the basis of legal order largely, and particularly the basis of international legal order, is to understand that people who have their own consideration of what counts as right and just even their own unilateral consideration of what's lawful in certain cases. Need to be in some way bridled because people will have different and often violently different views about what that entails. And the human cost of that clash of views is something that needs to be taken very seriously. Both because of the human cost of armed conflict but also because of the human cost to schemes of cooperation that might actually be much more significant in developing human well being across the world than particular excursions unilaterally by states.
	And talking about sovereignty I always have the problem, a number of people said, "Well you shouldn't use that word." But the word sovereignty is just like the word impunity people sorta just kind of want to spit when they hear it. It sounds like an invocation of the idea of being above the law. Sovereignty has to do with the idea of there being a uncommanded commander historically. So the invocation of sovereignty seems to be in some way a ligation of the project of the rule of law. And I'm told by some colleagues you can sell your idea a lot better if you just didn't use that proactive word. I think the word is actually important for detailed and sophisticated reasons. Some of which might not be worth trying to unearth here, but it's important to distinguish between different understandings of this words and the different understandings in which this word arises.
	So you have conversations about sovereignty in the context of international relations and political science departments where the concern about sovereignty has to do with some kind of empirical property of states. Their actual capacity to control particular fields or at least their capacity to make unilateral decision about how to behave with respect of particular fields of activity.
	Understood in those terms, sovereignty is always thought of being on the wane. In fact sovereignty never was what anybody every thought it was. There was always interdependence. There was always qualifications of sovereignty. And it's of course true that the more interdependent the world becomes and the smaller the world becomes, not only in terms of communications but also in terms of things like the spread of disease, and global warming and all kinds of other problems, clearing sovereignty is going to be less relevant in important ways, because the capacity to actually control matters unilaterally by states is severely hampered by the kinds of problems that there are. 
	Still it's very easy to focus on how much things have changed over time without focusing on how much things have stayed the same. And in fact as an empirical matter there are still something unequally important about state sovereignty in the sense of there being a local last word on public order in a territory. No matter how much we might think of ourselves as global citizens, there are very few of us who's lives could actually end or the collapse of public order in our home territory. So there is a certain core of realities about state hood and sovereignty that underline the international legal order. And it's true that the international legal order would change fundamentally if these things fundamentally changed. But the sorts of changes that we've had are not changes, they lead to changes in the content of international law but they don't particularly lead, yet at least, changes in the structure of international order.
	Another thing that people are talking about when they use the word sovereignty, and this is what particularity gives sovereignty a bad name among the people that I hang with, is that we have a group of people sometimes referred to as the new sovereigntests on the political right in the United States. And these people also go under the name of American Exceptionalism. And what they're concerned in the name of sovereignty is simply a policy imperative to maintain or reassert some unilateralism on the part of the United States. These are the people who don't want us to join the UN convention on the rights of the child, for fear that this will somehow interfere with American traditions of child rearing. They don't want us to join the UN convention on the law of the sea. They certainly don't want us, God forbid we should ever become parties on the elimination of the discrimination against women. The United States stays outside of many of these treaty regimes. The United States and its foreign relations law is extraordinarily reluctant to incorporate international legal norms into domestic legality. And they make an argument on this based upon the need for, to defend American sovereignty. Some of them seem to have a fixation on the possibility of black helicopters from the United Nations somehow descending upon them and stealing their guns or something. 
	But this is a kind of paranoia that's really irrelevant. There are countries in the world that have a lot of reason to be concerned about sovereignty in just his way. But the United States isn't one of those countries. I like evoking the new sovereigntest because my point is well if you people are as powerful as you are or as worried as you are, just think about how worried some other people are in poor weak countries that are trying to maintaining some sort of modicum of self determination of their lives.
	The third area of sovereignty is a diacritical concept of sovereignty but has to do with the monopoly of the last word of public order with in a territory that's based upon and older notions really dating from Bodan and Hobbs that, you know, you look at any particular political order ... Look hard enough you're going to find one last word, one commander who gives orders without having to take them. And that's what the core of domestic legal authority really is. 
	And this is actually not as stupid an idea as it sounds. But it has been from the very beginning was a very badly damaged by the criticisms of this sort of theory and everyone understands now, for example in the United States that if you were to try to identify this uncommanded commander in the US legal order, you know, where would you find it? We have a constitution that established this fragmentation of power. You know, we've got the house of representatives, and the senate, and the president, and the supreme court, and the states, and they're all operated in accordance of this constitutional blue print. And what we understand sovereignty to mean in the United States is that the working out of these processes generates the sovereign decision but the sovereignty is reducible to the operation of legal norms. That's what we mean in some sense talking about constitutionalism. That sovereignty is constituted by norms.
	And that is of course a major advance in the way to understand political authority domestically however it's been pointed out in certain circumstances this is not a totally convincing idea. And that is because what happens when there is a sense of existential threat to the legal order as a whole. What then? What if it becomes necessary to violate legal norms for the sake of maintaining the legal order as a whole?
	Abraham Lincoln addressed this issue in 1861, talking about whether it really made sense to him let all the laws but one go unexecuted by his dutifully execute the laws for the sake of maintaining faith with the bar against the unilaterally convention of Heinous Corpus. We've seen other rhetorics subsequent of that about the constitution not being a suicide pact. And probably the most important theorist on this subject, is the person who is probably most responsible for bringing Bodan and Hobbs back to life in the 20th century, Carl Schmitt. A truly miserable human being who is also someone that perhaps one shouldn't invoke at a conference. I really got brick backs for that. I was basically accused of being a fascist by just having invoked him. 
	But Schmitt had a very important insight, and which he came up with long before he can a Nazi in a book called 'Political Theology' in 1922, which has as it's most important grounding. The first sentence of the book is really what the whole book is it says, "Sovereign is who decides on the exception." That norms governed in normal times but there still is this residual question of who is going to defend the normal of order against its enemies, and there comes to be a moment in which a determination needs to be made, whether times are normal and whether norms apply, and whether the exception applies. And it's there that we find this residual aspect of sovereignty. 
	Now why talk about any of that since that's not the main event here in terms of sovereignty international law? It's because one needs to understand that domestic constitutionalism doesn't relate to the international legal order in the way that the federal system of the United States for example, operates. That we might think that the international legal order is a kind of seamless web of legality with states having their own constitutional orders subject to an over marching international order and therefore many things would follow from that sort of harmonious understanding. 
	What needs to be understood about sovereignty is that it represents the residual authority of political communities to revise their own political orders by extra constitutional means. And what has been understood as self determination in the international legal order and the way that sovereignty and equality has been exceptionalized, generally speaking the international legal order is that we have an international legal order of sovereign political communities. and whatever might be the constitutional law between those states, that's not what's being recognized by the international system. It's the political will of those communities have manifested in action. That is traditionally accepted as the source of sovereign authority for purposes or respecting sovereign equality among states. And for that reason, unconstitutional changes in authority with in states have typically be accepted my the international order on the principle of affective control through internal processes. 
	And so what counts as sovereignty from the stand point of international order is the state as governed by its internal processes not withstanding the fact that internal processes are very, very messy. And the way I've characterized the idea of sovereign equality in the international system really is to try to put it as unromantically as possible. That sovereignty is the right to be ruled by your own thugs and to fight your civil wars in peace. And it's important to be straight forward about that because it's important to encounter the critics on this on that very ground. It's true that this is going to leave a lot of injustice unremedied by the international system. And that feels intolerable in certain circumstances.
	But the international legal order does have systematic ways of addressing problems within states. It's just that those ways of addressing them are not going to you know, ultimately create the seamless web of legality that people want.
	So what sovereign equality means in the international system, is something based fundamentally these days on the United Nations charter. United Nations didn't create international law. International legal order has been around for hundreds of years. But the United Nations charter was really a new chapter in the international legal order. And one of us founded upon the availability of boundaries on the one hand, but also on the justification of the state as the manifestation of the self determination of a whole territorial population. And that you look at something like the ... When you look at the UN chart of the preamble says, "We the peoples of the untied nations," and then the principles of the UN charter speak about friendly relations among nations being based on the principle of self determination of peoples. 
	This is on the one hand just empty retroaortic. But on the other hand a conceptual understand of what it means to be respecting sovereignty. That we're not respecting foreign sovereigns because they're sovereign in their individual capacity. We're respecting political communities that are governed in particular ways and particular times.
	So the UN order, which beings with the charter in 1945 and develops very substantially and implicitly over the next couple of decades as decolonization takes place and as in effect you have a third world in the international community as distinct from the first and second world you have this non aligned block organized in various forms sometimes the G77 and so forth. But the main body of states actually in the UN general assembly, the political weight of that part of the world emergent from colonialism and coming from parts of the world that are less privileged and less economically prosperous in general terms. More dependent upon multi national investment and so forth. These are parts of the world that had a kind of common interest in helping to reshape the global order, to put a premium on sovereign equality as the basis of the defensive weak states from both blocks from both the liberal democratic west and the revolutionary socialist east. 
	And so the UN order really operates on the basis of a series of presumptions about sovereignty. The first presumption is the idea of consent is the basis of international law. And a lot of people fixate on this point and indeed consent could go on a great length about international methodology and what consent really means in this context. Consent doesn't mean consent in any philosophically valid sense, it's a very formalized understand as what counts of consent and it operates both directly and indirectly. But the basic idea is that states are bound only by norms who's validity  is somehow traceable to the exercise of their own will or at least their own acquiescence. And that is the presumption about international law. There is no international legislature. The general assembly can't pass a resolution and bind states that vote no. It's not like a kind of domestic legislative order. 
	At the same time there is an idea emergent in the international legal order that there are some norms so foundational to the international system that even what's called persistent projection of states that want to stay outside of those norms is ineffective against them. And this is the idea of jus cogens of parenting norms of international law. And people in the human rights field are very much enamored of the idea of jus cogens because it can be sometimes invoked in ways that are in defiance of states continuing to refuse to take on certain norms. But jus cogens has to be understood that on the one hand part of the ways in which state sovereignty is qualified by new national law methodologies at the same time jus cogens is still very much properly understood as grounded in a system where the basis of international legal authority is state concent.
	The next two presumptions are in some ways harder to grasp perhaps. One of them is that international legal norms are binding on a state to state basis presumptively. They also apply to not state actors in many respects but international law is only directly operative of law at all within states presumptively to the extent that they have been incorporated into the domestic legal order by a domestic sovereign act. That's actually very important for the stand point of US law. US foreign relations law is as murky as anything that anyone ever acclaimed international law to be, but US foreign relations law mightily resists the corporation of internatal law in spite the fact that you'll see rhetoric in old cases that say things like, "International law is part of our law." And you'll look at the constitution and you'll see that treaties are supposed to be part of the supreme law of the land. That has been under mind in every possible way by courts over time and increasingly so. 
	And it becomes quite significant when you think about international accountability for violations of norms. The United States is violation of international norms fairly routinely as the United States violates national law in many ways at many times. Certainly there are many controversies over the way in which the United States acts on many topics and many of them are topics having to do with human rights and fundamental matters having to do, with how we run our prisons. How we execute people. How we treat immigrants. How we you know, built this big wall in the south west, which sort of calculatedly lead to dying of exposure in the desert, which makes it sort of a wall more deadly than the Berlin wall if you think about it. We've done all sorts of things for which we might imagine US officials or even ordinary individuals cooperating with US officials would be put on trail in foreign states for. But it's our understanding that people are not subject to criminal sanction unless they have violated law that's operative of the time and place when they committed the act. And it's a very significant thing that the United States has not directly incorporated the kinds of norms that would make people individually accountable to whatever, by leaving them exposed to criminal prosecution. 
	If some friendly government where to get a hold of someone, then you could see a very significant problem with all that, of course it's not really going to happen to us. It's just that it happens to other people around the world and often by us and so the importance of this is an illustration of you know, what the consequences would be for us. If these sorts of barriers to doing justice across boarders where actually to fall.
	But the third thing is the inviolability of boundaries. And that has to do as I said with the UN chatter, the restriction on threats and uses of forces, force across boarders. But also there are considerable strictures on other kinds of exercises of power including things like secondary boycotts. If you tried to ruin the economy of a state by making clear to the states trading partners that if they trade with that state, they can't trade with you. Which are sorts of things that we have done in our legislation visa the Cube. But this is understood as unlawful internationally as well.
	But there are certain measures of interference in the internal affairs of states through this sort of corrosion that are inadmissible on grounds of sovereign equality. 
	Now there are as I said just as there are exceptions to the consensus standard and in terms of use comens there are exceptions to both this dualistic understanding of legality on the one hand where law applies between states but doesn't extend to the individual responsibility and with respect to this question of non intervention. So we have emerging in the international league of order really for quite some time but in a much bigger way since the end of the cold war the idea of a national criminal law. 
	And so there are any number of instruments that can be invoke internationally for the proposition that states have not only the license but the obligation to prosecute people that they find on their territory who have committed certain acts anywhere in the world. And this is the emerging notion of universal jurisdiction of crimes and instruments like the torture convention have established this. But there are important things to note about that. 
	The torture convention for example, which by the way was not needed for the purpose for condemning torture. Torture was already a violation of international law before the torture convention. But in 1987 the torture convention comes into force and the torture convention establishes that people who commit acts of torture even though they're under the authority of their states are subject to prosecution anywhere in the world. And this happened to Augusto Pinochet much to his surprise when the Spanish court indicted him for acts that this Chilian dictator committed against Chileans in Chile. And the UK house of Lords essentially held a very complicated set of decisions that at least any acts that he had committed after the coming into force of the torture convention represented extraditable crimes and he could be sent to Spain. He wasn't for a whole other set of reasons. 
	But that was a land mark decision on this point. And international criminal justice operates in this decentralized way with these respect to this matters. And its important to recognize then, we're talking about 193 justice systems with its own sense of justice and its own sense of who the people are in the world who are the bad guys that we ought to get. And those 193 justice systems may not represent your views of who the most important people around to get. So it's important to know how we want to bridle this exercise of extraordinary power by these kinds of justice systems.
	The torture convention distinguishes between torture on the one hand and cruel and human degrading treatment and punishment on the other. A lot of people really dislike this distinction. From the stand point of human rights it's a nonsense distinction. Peoples' human rights are violated on both sides of that line. But most people don't realize when you talk about torture is in the global war on terrorism is that most of the miserable and appalling human cost inflicted by the United States on people who were detainees in the global war on terrorism. Some of them continue to be detainees in the global war on terrorism. Fall into international law terms within the category of cruel and human degrading treatment.
	What counts as torture and stuff like waterboarding, so everyone one likes to talk about, "So we only waterboarded a few people." "You know, and we waterboarded people who were sort of particularly unsympathetic figures." We've committed cruel and human degrading against hundreds if not thousands of people. We engaged in really extraordinary kinds of abuses that violate fundamental human rights. Which by the way we've never apologized to those people, and never promised anybody reparations, and never had a truth commission. But that is not really within the scope of international criminal justice. It's within the scope of human rights. But international criminal justice is limited only to the sorts of crimes that had been specially identified as being subject to this extraordinary power. 
	And so when my old acquaintance, John Yoo, wrote this memo of making the distinction between torture and cruel and human degrading treatment and trying to say that you know, you can actually do all of theses remarkable things and still stay on the human degrading treatment side of the line and not be guilty of the crime of torture. He's at least half right, the line is there. Where the line was he got entirely wrong. But it's important to maintain this distention, because a lot depends on it from the point of due process from the stand point of people not being subjected to norms that they have no knowledge of when they committed the act and where not applicable to them at that time. And particularly to the whims of 193 justice systems.
	Further we have the ... With the question of intervention and the invariability of boundaries we have the security council. And we have the rule of course if fifteen states of security council you need nine votes, affirmative votes and no vetos in order to authorize extortionary exercises with power under article 41 in the case of economic sanctions in the light. And under article 42 in the case of the uses of force and this is the way in which we deal with question where atrocities in side of states are considered broadly intolerable in violation of fundamental principles of the international order.
	The problem is that we need to have not just substance of standers but processes. Particularly because we have untrusted and untrust worthy implementers of universal justice. And what we've got it is a system that requires an extortionary consensus to suspend the ordinary rules of the international system to license this kind of intervention across borders. And a lot of people of course don't like this particularly when other countries are doing the vetoing of the thing that they want to see done. We always hear about the security council failing to do its job of security council. Deadlocking and therefore somehow being inert and that because a justification for our working around the security council it's intolerable that our empowered righteousness should be constrained by a concern to keep faith with the UN charter that requires this procedural authorization. And you know all about what presidential candidates say about the security council, "We don't need any permission slips." That's a slogan that should send chills up everyone's spine but it's one that the people in the human rights field have become seduced by to a considerable extent because they are you know concerned to do good in the name of human rights by whatever means are necessary not withstanding the kinds of legal strictures in place.
	So these are the sort of things that I have laid out in the book as you know kind of argument for as to what the international system entails. What the exceptions are? How the exceptions might be worked and at the same time to make the argument that we need to keep faith with and international legal system that represents an accommodation among people with different values, different interests, and different levels of power in the international order. If we are going to be able to maintain a scheme of cooperation that gets important humanitarian things done in the world and if we're going to prevent people flying the false flag of humanitarianism and exercising extraordinary force basically creating what I've call a ruthlessness to defeat all ruthlessness. 
	Thank you and I look forward to your questions.