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

• The first republication of this seminal work in international criminal law since 1965
• Provides a clear demonstration of the interplay between national and international law in this field
• Once again highly topical, in the light of the recent jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunals of the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda
• Features a new preface from Professor Dinstein, evaluating this work in a modern context

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.

Readership: Students and scholars of international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict; students and scholars of international criminal law