Foreword

The authors in this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems explore the everyday lives of international law. More specifically, the authors theorize and investigate select practices of the International Criminal Court (ICC), by which I mean recurrent and meaningful work activities—social or material—that are performed in a regularized fashion and that have a bearing, whether large or small, on the operation of the ICC. By conceiving the ICC as a bundle of practices rather than as a unitary actor whose performance is primarily governed by politics, I seek to re-direct the existing literature on the much debated international organization, which has largely failed to engage, both theoretically and empirically, with the inner workings of the sizable bureaucracy based in The Hague—and the many organizational, cultural, and other cleavages that run through it and that have had a more than random institutional effect on international adjudication. In this foreword I give a brief account of the theoretical foundations on which this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems rests, then provide an overview of the empirical investigations. I close by briefly sketching avenues for further research

The Political Economy of 'Lawfare'

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Jens Meierhenrich is Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University, where he is also a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His lecture is on the Political Economy of "Lawfare."Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, streaming video, photo

The structure of online activism

Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how “active” is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur “Cause” on Facebook to provide a detailed first look at a massive online social movement. While both donation and recruitment behavior are socially patterned, the vast majority of Cause members recruited no one else into the Cause and contributed no money to it-suggesting that in the case of the Save Darfur campaign, Facebook conjured an illusion of activism rather than facilitating the real thing

The remnants of the Rechtsstaat: an ethnography of Nazi law

This book is an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual State (1941, reissued 2017), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel's was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of Nazism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany. His sophisticated-not to mention courageous-analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. As a result of its clandestine origins, The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of intellectual resistance to the Nazi regime. In this book, Jens Meierhenrich revives Fraenkel's innovative concept of "the dual state," restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public law scholarship. Blending insights from legal theory and legal history, he tells in an accessible manner the remarkable gestation of Fraenkel's ethnography of law from inside the belly of the behemoth. In addition to questioning the conventional wisdom about the law of the Third Reich, Meierhenrich explores the legal origins of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. The book sets the parameters for a theory of the "authoritarian rule of law," a cutting edge topic in law and society scholarship with immediate policy implications