2008 Survey of Books Related to the Law
In 1999, after more than twenty years as a federal judge, I became a trial judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Up to that time, my knowledge of war had been derived from the dozens of books and movies I had read and watched as I lived through World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the two Gulf Wars. Every day for the next two years, I listened to the heart-wrenching stories of Balkan survivors of genocide, massacres, prison camps, and planned executions. I remember particularly one compelling woman who testified that in a single fateful week she had lost a husband, son, father, brother, and twenty-six male relatives in the genocide at Srebrenica. She announced to the court: “We wish him [the defendant general] a death penalty, for him to disappear from the face of the earth.”