Revisiting Wasserman’s Laws of War
In the early 1970s, as a student at Tuskegee Institute, I came across a set of mimeograph papers left behind by Professor Louis Wasserman after he departed for UCLA. These treatises on the laws of war have stayed with me among my files ever since.
Wasserman’s thesis was unsettling. He argued that the laws of war should not be treated as morally supreme. He dismantled two common defenses: first, that they embody fundamental moral distinctions; second, that adherence to them produces desirable effects. For Wasserman, both claims were inadequate. Rules alone could not prevent atrocities, nor could they absolve us of deeper moral responsibility.