Carl Schmitt and the critique of lawfare.

AuthorLuban, David
PositionSymposium: Lawfare

"Lawfare" is the use of law as a weapon of war against a military adversary. Lawfare critics complain that self-proclaimed "humanitarians" are really engaged in the partisan and political abuse of law--lawfare. This paper turns the mirror on lawfare critics themselves, and argues that the critique of lawfare is no less abusive and political than the alleged lawfare it attacks. Radical lawfare critics view humanitarian law with suspicion, as nothing more than an instrument used by weak adversaries against strong military powers. By casting suspicion on humanitarian law, they undermine disinterested argument, and ultimately undermine the validity of their own critique. The paper then explores the vision of politics and law underlying the lawfare critique through a reading of the most significant theorist who defends that vision, the German theorist Carl Schmitt. Through a reading and critique of Schmitt, the article examines both the force of the lawfare critique and its flaws.

  1. INTRODUCTION II. CARL SCHMITT AS LAWFARE CRITIC III. SCHMITT, STRAUSS, AND THE QUESTION OF INFLUENCE IV. SCHMITT'S MISREPRESENTATION OF POLITICS I. INTRODUCTION

    "Lawfare" is the use of law as a weapon of war against a military adversary. Law can be weaponized in many ways, but easiest is accusing the adversary of war crimes, thereby subjecting him to harassment through litigation and bad publicity. War crimes accusations are not the only method of lawfare, of course. The U.S. government lawyers who wrote the torture memos, contriving legal arguments to legitimize Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture, were engaged in lawfare of a different sort; indeed, John Yoo, the best-known of these lawyers, indirectly boasted about lawfare by titling his memoir War By Other Means, (1) an ingenious twist on the Clausewitizian dictum that war is politics by other means. In his view, apparently, the law he practiced in his government service was war by other means, which is simply another name for lawfare. In other contexts as well, states can wage lawfare just as non-state actors can. Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., who popularized the term "lawfare," points out that lawfare "can operate as a positive 'good,'" and details several examples in which the United States has substitut[ed] lawfare methodologies for traditional material means. (2) My chief example of lawfare, though, will be accusations by non-state actors of war crimes by a powerful, modern army. That is surely what today's shouting is about.

    Although the term "lawfare" can be used purely descriptively, as General Dunlap does, it usually is not. (3) "Lawfare" is a pejorative and polemical word. To accuse someone of lawfare is to accuse them of something sneaky. There are two pieces to the accusation. First is the insinuation that those who wage lawfare are fighting by cowardly means. That was the implication of a much-remarked sentence from the National Defense Strategy of the United States in 2002 and 2005: "Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.'' (4) Lumping judicial processes together with terrorism as part of a "strategy" is equivalent to accusing those who take the United States government to court with lawfare of a particularly vile sort, and labeling lawfare "a strategy of the weak" is a taunt. Why doesn't the enemy just come out and fight like real men, instead of pretending to be disinterested adherents to legality?

    Second, the lawfare accusation implicitly assumes that "lawriors"--as I shall call those who engage in lawfare--are abusing the law by making unfounded accusations of illegality against their enemies. The lawrior poses as a disinterested legal actor who, more in sorrow than in anger, calls the world's attention to war crimes by a party who, just by coincidence, happens to be the adversary. Such accusations are factually or legally baseless. So lawfare is a double affront, against both martial virtue and legal virtue.

    Let me say a bit more about why lawfare offends against legal virtue. Lawfare is a species of the politicization of law. Legitimate legal claims appeal to standards that transcend the particular case and the particular parties. Legal claims are never supposed to be demands backed by nothing but the will of the parties--"give it to me because I want it!"--but rather demands backed by claims under neutral standards, taking the form "give it to me because I have a legal right to it!" Of course we are entitled to skepticism about the political neutrality of the law at all levels: legislation, access to legal institutions, judicial interpretation, and application of law to facts. But law can and does hold out the promise of at least relative neutrality and relative depoliticization--compared with partisan mud-slinging, dirty tricks, and armed conflict; and it is hard to see how law could fool so many people so much of the time if it never delivered on the promise.

    The lawfare critic accuses the enemy lawrior of politicizing law, presumably for base reasons. Specifically, the lawfare critic accuses the enemy lawrior of abusing international humanitarian law and international criminal law to hamstring or at least harass enemy military planners. (5) The past decade has seen two major eruptions of the lawfare critique. (6) The first was by the United States during the Bush Administration, and the second was by Israel and American supporters of Israel in the wake of the Goldstone Report. In the first case, the accusations were that the governments of "old Europe" and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) aimed to undermine U.S. tactics in the War on Terror for essentially political motives. (7) Here, the accusation of lawfare was indirect: no one accused the ICRC or western Europeans of intentionally aiding al-Qaeda, although some lawfare critics insinuated that the Europeans might have a geopolitical agenda of hobbling U.S. military dominance. (8) Rather, the accusation was that the humanitarian groups are the jihadis' useful idiots. The reaction to the Goldstone Report was different: here, the accusation was, in the words of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, that Richard Goldstone was "the chief of the hanging party" whose "mandate ... was to find Israel guilty.'' (9) This is a more direct accusation of intentional and deliberate lawfare than in the American debate.

    Just as the accusation of lawfare is a species of the broader accusation of politicizing law--specifically, that lawriors politicize law for someone's military advantage--it is also a species of ad hominem argument* By unmasking the recourse to humanitarian law as lawfare on behalf of an interested party's military goals, lawfare critics deflects attention from the substance of the legal claims to the self-interest and sneaky motives of the person entering them. Like all ad hominem arguments, the lawfare critique has the rhetorical function of diverting attention from what classical rhetoric called the logos of an argument--its substance--to its ethos--the character of the speaker. (10) The logos in this case is the argument that soldiers have committed war crimes; the ethos is the insidious and militarized motives of making those accusations.

    Of course, ad hominem criticism is itself the primary technique of politicized argument. Lawfare critics are themselves engaged in lawfare. Not that critiques of lawfare are necessarily a form of lawfare, just as not all war crimes accusations are a form of lawfare. Sometimes an argument is just an argument* But the most conspicuous lawfare critics are suspicious of the claims of self-proclaimed humanitarian and human rights lawyers to be disinterested. Engaged in mortal combat against the lawriors, lawfare critics have no more use for disinterested inquiry than does a soldier on a battlefield. (11)

    Some issues seem to lend themselves to politicized academic treatment because they tap into high-stakes public controversies, however indirectly. Some years ago, I was working on a law-and-literature paper about the trial scene in Aeschylus's Oresteia, and my research led to questions about whether there has ever been a historical matriarchy. (12) One famous 1861 interpretation of the Oresteia maintains that its legend derives from an actual conquest of a matriarchal Greek society by patriarchal Dorian invaders. (13) Frederick Engels accepted this interpretation in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and as a result it became official dogma in the Communist world. (14) I discovered that it was virtually impossible to find classicists on either side of the question of historical matriarchy who were not caught up in Cold War polemics. It was difficult for an outsider to the debate, such as myself, who had no dog in the fight, to find scholarship that did not smell unreliable. (15) Apparently, the Cold War sucked even an obscure question of anthropology and archaeology into a political vortex, and pulled the scholars in with it. Another example is the tiresome and endless debate about punitive damages and alleged American litigiousness and runaway juries. Some years ago I attended an academic conference on punitive damages with a...

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