Weighing Lives in War examines the core principles of the modern law of war: necessity, proportionality, and distinction, and provides new and innovative insights into the process of weighing lives implicit in all theories of jus in bello.

The literature on rights in both moral and legal philosophy is voluminous, so voluminous that there may seem to be little justification for one more symposium to swell its ranks. But the discussion of rights has been fairly tightly organized around several narrow topics of debate, among them whether rights should be explained in terms of interests or choices, 1 whether rights are strictly correlative with duties, 2 and the relation between rights and utility. 3 The inspiration for the present (...) symposium is the sense that one topic of central importance has generally been given short shrift: the question of whether rights can conflict. There is, of course, a perfectly good explanation for why this topic has received so little attention; namely that contemporary rights theorists have generally assumed that rights cannot conflict. 4 But this assumption seems to be out of keeping with the way people commonly speak about rights as well as the way in which rights are usually understood in our constitutional tradition. (shrink)

This volume explores moral and legal issues relating to sovereignty by addressing foundational questions about its nature, examining state sovereignty between states, and dealing with post 9/11 developments in the U.S., potentially destabilizing received views of democratic sovereignty. With essays addressing foundational, state and international sovereignty, the book focuses on Post 9/11 developments including the profusion of secret national security programs, including those pertaining to the interrogation, rendition, and detention of terror suspects; signal intercepts and meta-data analysis; and targeted killing (...) of irregular militants; prompting questions regarding the legitimacy of executive power in this arena. (shrink)