Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War
California Law Review VOL. 86 OCTOBER 1998 No. 5 Copyright © 1998 by California Law Review, Inc. Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War Mark J. Osielt TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................... 944 General Background ......................................................................... 946 A. Genealogy of Terms ............................................................. 951 B. "Cracking the Culture" of the "Separate Community" ...... 953 C. Civilian and Military Approaches to Legal Error ................... 959 D. Current Law as Compromise ................................................. 961 E. Why Ever Excuse Obedience to Illegal Orders? ............ .. .......965 I. Obedience to Superior Orders: The Uncertain Scope of Manifest Illegality ....................................................................... 969 A. The Nature of the Defense .................................................... 971 Copyright © 1998 California Law Review, Inc. t Mark J. Osiel, Professor of Law, University of Iowa. J.D., Ph.D., Harvard University, 1987. For their helpful comments, I would like to thank Steven Burton, Eliot A. Cohen, Mary Dudziak, Sir Michael Howard, Kenneth Kress, Col. Howard Levie, Lt. Col. Mark Martins, John Norton Moore, Maj. Gen. A.P.V. Rogers, Tina Rosenberg, Col. Scott Silliman, Robert F. Turner, Detlev Vagts, Lea Vandervelde, and the participants in faculty seminars at Stanford and the University of Iowa. Conversations with several leading Judge Advocate General (hereinafter JAG) officers and civilian Defense Department lawyers, whose anonymity must be preserved, proved invaluable. Discussions with Carlos Nino and Jaime Malamud-Goti, while they were prosecuting officers for crimes arising from Argentina's "dirty war," were also very helpful. I am grateful to several members of legal academia who were willing, on condition of anonymity, to share some rather unflattering tales of their own military activities during World War II and the Korean War.
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