Law Against Genocide

'Law Against Genocide is both a synoptic and reflexive approach to genocide studies that exposes the complexities and limits of understanding a crime whose legacies are inassimilable to conventional legal and social scientific scholarship' Social and Legal Studies, Studies 13 (4) 2004 'Refreshingly, Hirsh does not evoke a misguided and misplaced optimism, but portrays such a law in its actuality as it develops and accommodates the demands for justice in a world beset by violence and cruelty. 'http://www.du.edu/gsis/hrhw/volumes/2004/weinert-2004.pdf 'Three recent books might be expected to shed light on these conundrums. David Hirsh, in Law Against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials, takes a likeably broad view of international criminal law or war crimes trials. His 'cosmopolitan trials' include not just classic war crimes in the Nuremberg mode (e.g. the ICTY hearings in The Hague) but also domestic trials (Sawoniuk in the UK) and civil cases (the Irving defamation proceedings). Hirsh concedes that these cases are considered on the serendipitous grounds that the author happened to be around at the time but, paradoxically, the result of this accidental scholarship is a comprehensive theory about what these cases are about or add up to (they are part of cosmopolitan law). Hirsh take the view that war crimes trial are cosmopolitan and didactic They are part of the transformation of international law and the decentering of the state but they also educate and enlighten (these various effects are not fully in evidence in every trial, of course).' International Journal of Law in Context, I,I pp. 101-113 (2005) 'A thoroughly argued, well-researched book...' European Journal of Social Thoery 8(1): 87 - 90