Jeremy Rabkin

Worlds Apart on International Justice

Differing strategic priorities are only the beginning of the dispute over the International Criminal Court. Americans will not abandon their traditional constitution, as submission to the ICC would require. European states have already subordinated their national constitutions to a German-dominated federation. Americans do not accept international monitors in fighting against evil. Europeans are drawn to relativizing abstractions. For Germans, the ICC promises to “overcome the past,” by licensing German judges to try Americans and Israelis for war crimes. Europeans may feel obliged to fall in step with this latest German project. The US still has the moral self-confidence to resist it.

The Secret Life of the Private Attorney General

The “private attorney general” came out of the shadows in the 1970s. In 1943, when the phrase first appeared in a federal appeals court ruling, army generals commanded a lot more attention than any form of attorney general. For decades thereafter, the term was an isolated oddity in the case reports. Then in the 1970s, the term seemed to be everywhere. With sympathetic nurturing from courts and Congress, this form of legal advocacy seemed for a time to be a powerful engine of public policy. Over the past decade, however, the “private attorney general” has been in retreat, beset by critics and rivals and increasingly starved of resources and political support. If not quite back in the shadows, it is certainly under a cloud. In retrospect, neither the earlier obscurity nor the current climate of disfavor are very surprising. Rather, what seems incongruous is the general approbation for the private attorney general during the 1970s. After all, the phrase— and the thought behind it—are inherently disorienting. The “private attorney general” is someone who is understood to be suing on behalf of the public, but doing so on his own initiative, with no accountability to the government or the electorate. For most of this century, public administration experts urged that the federal government needed to be made more accountable to the chief executive. In this context, the notion of a “private attorney general” would have struck most observers as an oddity on a par with a “private government”—or a private general. But the era when the “private attorney general” flourished was a peculiar time. There were still great hopes for government, as evidenced by a flood of new federal regulatory programs. At the same time, the nation experienced an intense distrust of government and a relentless pursuit of scandal allegations, which ultimately drove an elected President from office for the first time in American history. In this climate, courts lowered standing barriers, allowing

Laundering Leo Strauss

ABSTRACT Robert Howses book on Leo Strauss tries to defend Strauss by emphasizing how different he was from todays “Straussians.” In Howses telling, Strausss best-known followers favor war and oppression, though Strauss himself did not. To make this case, Howse relies not only on absurd caricatures of Strausss students but on highly distorted (or highly selective) accounts of what Strauss himself wrote. Howse tries to make a positive case for Strauss as a “man of peace” by showing that Strauss supported “international law.” He makes that case by depicting “international law” as one continuous tradition since Grotius, oblivious to the many varieties of outlooks and doctrines that have invoked some version of international law. On Howses account, those who have qualms about the United Nations or the European Union must be regarded as nihilists—hence at odds with “Leo Strauss, Man of Peace.”