Jonathan Shapiro (Columbia Law School; University of Oxford – University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, Students; Columbia College (NY)) has posted Making Sense of the Law of War: Towards a Liberal Romanticism on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Modern jurisprudence can generally be categorized as either Liberal or Romantic, with the Liberal worldview treating individuals as basic—and therefore collectives such as nations or states as nothing more than mere aggregations of individuals—while the Romantic worldview treating collectives and categories applicable to them such as honor as a starting point. But neither Liberalism nor Romanticism can explain the possibility of genuinely binding laws of war: Liberals can understand law but not war-Romantics, war but not law. Thus, if genuinely binding laws of war are to be possible, these two jurisprudential families cannot be exhaustive. This Paper attempts to introduce a third family, Liberal Romanticism, which accepts a Romantic notion of the profound ontological existence of collectives but proceeds from this starting point with a Liberal universality.
Very interesting and recommended.