Michael J. Glennon is professor of constitutional and international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He is former legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the author of “Constitutional Diplomacy.”
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In the event of an armed attack, the United States “reserves the right to determine for itself what military action, if any, is appropriate.”
Customary international law and general principles of law recognized by civilized nations prohibit the assassination of governmental officials during peacetime.
If the House of Representatives wished to resurrect the appropriations power as a check on unwanted presidential war-making, how might it go about doing so?
Is the United Nations Charter law? Frequent violations of the charter and its uncertain impact on state practice, Jack Goldsmith points out in an April 16 post, lead many to wonder whether it really functions as law—but they wonder too much, he suggests. The question whether the charter is law is misleading or meaningless, or both. Uncertainties about the international law of war powers, he writes, differ little from uncertainties about the meaning and efficacy of the constitutional law of war powers.
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A review of Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro's, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
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