This article draws on well-established understandings of international treaty interpretation and the role of the judicial function to propose seven canons of treaty construction that may serve as the basis of a principled interpretation of the substantive law of the Rome Statute. This interpretative framework is then applied to the seemingly intractable debate within the Court and among scholars over the correct interpretation of Article 25, on modes of liability. The seven canons provide guidelines that may enable the ‘Rorschach blot’ of Article 25, capable of many divergent interpretations, to become uniformly and consistently understood and interpreted.

This article examines whether the ICC Prosecutor has complied with its statutory obligation under Article 54(1)(a) of the Rome Statute to investigate incriminating and exonerating circumstances equally. By way of a number of striking examples of deficient investigations, it demonstrates that the ICC Prosecutor has so far failed to comply with this obligation. As a matter of competence and diligence, the Prosecutor is expected to conduct thorough investigations: this requires a critical assessment of each case and the supporting evidential material. An examination of the pending ICC cases shows that the Prosecutor has not met this expectation. The investigations conducted in all of these cases have been incomplete as far as both incriminating and exonerating circumstances are concerned. This article, however, also suggests that the defence is in a better position to search for exonerating evidence than the Prosecutor, and questions whether Article 54(1)(a) can be applied effectively under any conditions.

This article compares and contrasts the interpretation of the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement 1999 by the International Court of Justice, the Peace Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the European Court of Human Rights. In doing so, it critically analyses the approach of the three different tribunals and attempts to explain the differences identified on the basis of the jurisdictional scope of each tribunal and the substantive law each has been tasked to apply. This comparison is both substantive and procedural. The article then examines the impact of these three tribunals on two specific aspects of the rule of law: legal accountability and legal certainty, both internationally and in the countries under examination. It is argued that, while these tribunals have enhanced legal certainty and accountability on the international level, any contribution they have made to the domestic rule of law has been questionable.

This is the story behind another story. Inspired by the anthropological practice of reflexivity, it traces some practical, epistemological, ethical, and existential questions behind a book based on empirical socio-legal research into international criminal law in situations of conflict. The challenges involved in such research are at times impossible to overcome. Indeed, the challenges may be such that the researcher will never be able to answer her original question fully and confidently. However, challenges can be findings in themselves. They may reveal insights into the role of law in a society, the limitations of vocabularies, the overexposure of international criminal law, and inequalities in global knowledge production. Rather than merely obstructing research into a topical issue, challenges may shift the researcher's attention to other, more fundamental, questions. Nonetheless, understanding challenges as findings does not resolve the existential problem of the researcher's possible complicity in maintaining the very challenges that she analyses and perhaps ambitiously tries to overcome.

Professor Ruti Teitel, author of Humanity's Law, is perhaps best known for her foundational work on the concept of transitional justice. She is a proven norm entrepreneur. Her development of the concept of transitional justice demonstrates her ability to detect progress for those victimized by atrocities. It also demonstrates her skill in developing responses to those atrocities. Transitional justice, as Teitel envisioned it, has an ambitious agenda as a ‘conception of justice associated with periods of political change, characterized by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes’. That said, transitional justice in its original conception has a specific focus, limited by time and circumstance. Those limits are in part responsible for its success as a concept and practice.

Some books present such a wide variety of perspectives and so many interesting themes and topics in a particular area of law that it is rather difficult to write a comprehensive but at the same time concise review article about them. Consequently, such books run the risk of remaining unobserved or unattended, however valuable may be their contribution to the development of that area of law. Something like that threatened to happen to the volume of papers that was edited by Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson and published in 2011. Writing the book review remained for rather a long time on my to-do list, because reading it had incited me to reconsider my own answers to some foundational questions about feminism, about law, and about the ‘and’ that seems so firmly situated between these two concepts. In fact, feminism and law have been at the core of my professional activities since I finished law school in 1983, so for some thirty years for me these two things were closely connected. I thought that I knew very well what I was doing and why! Reading this book – and having agreed to review it – made these questions manifest and urgent to answer. The book, in short, invokes much (self-critical) thinking about the why and how of any engagement with feminism and (international) law, which is a first reason to recommend it to anyone who stands open for such an endeavour. After a brief description of its structure and content, I will discuss just a few of the many thought-provoking materials in this volume and some of my preliminary reactions to them.