Ohlin: War's Rustic Code of Honor

Jens David Ohlin (Cornell Univ. - Law) has posted War's Rustic Code of Honor (Virginia Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

With armed conflict raging all around, international law generally, and the law of war specifically, has come under renewed scrutiny. Do we live in a rules-based international order, and does law regulate and constrain battlefield behavior? Previous explorations of this controversy have used empirical analysis or jurisprudential investigations. But an illuminating answer to this question may come from an unlikely source -- the world of opera. Drawing inspiration from the Italian opera Cavalleria Rusticana, a melodrama about a rural village gripped by seduction, betrayal, and a fatal duel, this Article argues that war is governed by a rustic code of honor, based on norms that are often described as chivalry. The relationship between the ancient tradition of chivalry and the modern Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) is not new, but this Article's novel contribution hangs not on invoking the concept of chivalry, but rather on highlighting its "rustic" qualities. Using this framework of rusticity, this Article explores the variety of meanings that rusticity can have and shows that they provide a compelling framework for identifying not just the shortcomings of the law of war, as an allegedly primitive legal system, but also the great virtues of the law of war as a robust system of normative regulation -- an alternate meaning of "rustic" but an equally important one. As in the plot of the opera, where chivalry constitutes the only meaningful constraint on behavior in its rural village far from central legal authority, chivalry in war is a pre-legal norm deeply embedded in the psyche of its participants and in its distant location, divorced from civil authority. In both contexts, chivalry ripens into a full-blown system that is deserving of the label of "law," as imperfect as it is. What emerges is a portrait of the law of war that is at once realistic and even-handed, rather than caricatured in either direction by its critics or boosters. Yes, the law of war is rustic in the sense that it is distant, primitive, and unsophisticated. But the law of war is also rustic in the sense that it is simple, uncomplicated, robust, distilled to its core, and ultimately effective because it is tailored, in bespoke fashion, for its unique context. This is War's Rustic Code of Honor.