Bøger af John Fabian Witt

Pulitzer Prize FinalistBancroft Prize WinnerABA Silver Gavel Award WinnerA New York Times Notable Book of the YearIn the closing days of 1862, just three weeks before Emancipation, the administration of Abraham Lincoln commissioned a code setting forth the laws of war for US armies. It announced standards of conduct in wartime—concerning torture, prisoners of war, civilians, spies, and slaves—that shaped the course of the Civil War. By the twentieth century, Lincoln’s code would be incorporated into the Geneva Conventions and form the basis of a new international law of war. In this deeply original book, John Fabian Witt tells the fascinating history of the laws of war and its eminent cast of characters—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Lincoln—as they crafted the articles that would change the course of world history. Witt’s engrossing exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of the laws of war is a prehistory of our own era. Lincoln’s Code reveals that the heated controversies of twenty-first-century warfare have roots going back to the beginnings of American history. It is a compelling story of ideals under pressure and a landmark contribution to our understanding of the American experience.

A concise history of how American law has shaped-and been shaped by-the experience of contagion

Topics debated range from the US's contested policy of so-called "targeted killing" in Pakistan's tribal regions to fears over the damaging effects such weaponry has on our democratic institutions to the more abstract moral questions raised by killing via remote control such as the duty to capture over kill.

Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics., each of whom came up against the power of national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.

Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the 20th century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped 20th- and 21st-century American accident law and laid the foundations of the American administrative state.