My Review of William Shawcross’s “Justice and the Enemy”
It can be found here (and Wells’s review for Lawfare can be found here.) I liked the book, which uses the dilemmas and compromises of Nuremburg as a lens for Shawcross's empathetic and fair-minded account of the cross-cutting pressures and difficult trade-offs the Bush administration (and later the Obama administration) face
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It can be found here (and Wells’s review for Lawfare can be found here.) I liked the book, which uses the dilemmas and compromises of Nuremburg as a lens for Shawcross's empathetic and fair-minded account of the cross-cutting pressures and difficult trade-offs the Bush administration (and later the Obama administration) faced in deciding how to bring justice to the perpetrators of 9/11. My main criticism:
Shawcross often expresses frustration with the extraordinary legal and judicial scrutiny of American counterterrorism policies during the last decade. But as the evolution of military commissions illustrates, this scrutiny, and the legitimating alterations by the other branches of government that it brought, led us to a place where President Obama, seized of the responsibilities of the presidency, has been able to embrace these policies and confer on them a legitimacy that his predecessor never could have.
Jack Goldsmith is the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003.
