Editorial Note

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12255
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Published date: 01 September 2019

© 2019 The Author. Ratio Juris © 2019 John Wi ley & Sons Ltd.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 32 No. 3 September (254–255)

Editorial Note

In the first of two installments, the following set of papers gathers contributions to

the workshop Answering for International Crimes: Perspectives from Moral, Political and

Legal Theory, which took place on July 3–4, 2017, at the PluriCourts center for excel-

lence of the University of Oslo. The workshop was conceived and organized by Alain

Zysset (University of Glasgow) with the help of Ryan Liss (Western University). The

practical organization of the workshop was made possible thanks to the generous

funding of PluriCourts (funded by the Norwegian Research Council under Project

No. 223274), with the world-class assistance of Ester Strømmen (research assistant

at PluriCourts). The organizer would like to express his gratitude to PluriCourts for

the generous resources allocated to the workshop and to its co-directors, Andreas

Føllesdal and Geir Ulfstein. The workshop presentations also benefited from highly

skilled commentators from the Faculty of Law of the University of Oslo, and in par-

ticular Carola Lingaas, Kjersti Lohne, and Nobuo Hayashi. The finalized papers were

subsequently submitted to Ratio Juris for publication and underwent the journal’s

usual peer-review process.

The overall aim of the workshop was to bring an emerging group of leading schol-

ars together and revisit and/or fundamentally challenge some predominant norma-

tive approaches to the nature, scope, and justification of international crimes. While

sharing some core premises of the analytic tradition in legal and political theory,

the contributors reflect a diversity of subdisciplinary profiles, including domestic,

transnational, and international criminal law theory; democratic theory; and human

rights theory. The purpose of preserving this pluralism was to explore what the con-

tributors consider to be some of the blind spots in the predominant literature. In that

vein, the papers evaluate conventional approaches in two methodologically distinct

ways. The first is to test a predominant normative approach against some neglected

aspects of international or transnational criminality. The paper by Malcolm Thorburn

(University of Toronto), for instance, challenges some core claims of revisionist just

war theory by examining the distinctive structure of international humanitarian law

violations. Similarly, the paper by Kenneth S. Gallant (University of Arkansas at

Little Rock) assesses two specifically transnational contexts of criminality through

the lens of the relational account of criminal responsibility developed by R.A. Duff.