The Defence of 'Obedience to Superior Orders' in International Law

Yoram Dinstein

Oct 2012 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

The first comprehensive monograph on the defence of superior orders after the second world war, which remains pre-eminent in the field, the republication of this highly-sophisticated work once again makes this book available to scholars and students in the field. First published in 1965, Yoram Dinstein set the standard for future analysis of this issue, providing a ground-breaking interpretation that integrated domestic and international law to provide a subtle and nuanced challenge to the countervailing perceptions of the time, shaped as they were by the Nuremburg and Eichmann trials. The recent jurisprudence of the ad hoc Tribunals has shown remarkably similar analyses to those offered by Dinstein in this book, demonstrating that this key work remains relevant today. Reviewing the relevant precedents that existed at the time, this book shows that superior orders were not, in and of themselves, a defence, but that orders were relevant to other defences, and therefore should not be entirely ignored. Assessing the issue on a conceptual and practical level, and offering an extraordinary level of detail, this is a is a seminal work in international criminal law. It makes required reading for scholars, students, and practitioners of international criminal law.

About the author

Yoram Dinstein is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Tel-Aviv University. He has twice served as the Charles H. Stockton Professor of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, has previously been a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, a Meltzer Visiting Professor of Law at New York University, and a visiting Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. He has served as Chairman of the Israel national branch of Amnesty International, as a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and on the Council of the San Remo International Institute of Humanitarian Law.