Professor Scharf is a leading scholar on international humanitarian law and the institutions being forged to prosecute war criminals. His new book, Balkan Justice, is a testament to that scholarship. New England School of Law can be very proud of his contributions to both theory and practice in a field that is, unfortunately, growing. The challenges confronting international justice today are daunting. The absence of justice is too often the norm rather than the exception in lands where armed conflicts and atrocities proliferate.
Combatants are as likely to know as much about the laws of war as they do about quantum mechanics.
The severity of mass killings in our own time, on the eve of the millennium, reflects how little we know of ourselves, of our neighbors, and of our future. Neither our faith in the impressive march of technology nor our other aspirations for the next century can overshadow the grotesque reality of the massacres that characterize civilization, or the lack thereof, in today's troubled world. National systems of justice are the front-line defense but they have proven problematic. In the ideal world, every war crime, every crime against humanity, and every act of genocide would be prosecuted either in the territory where it was committed or by the state of nationality of the defendant. Yet there are significant cases in which no one is prosecuted by responsible domestic authorities.