Our recent article, War Manifestos, was the first work of legal scholarship to examine the documents that set out the legal reasons sovereigns provided for going to war from the late fifteenth century until the mid-twentieth century.
We thank Drew Adan, Alison Burke, Ann-Marie Cooper, Clément Dupuy, Jason Eiseman, Sarah Kraus, Evelyn Ma, John Nann, Michael VanderHeijden, and especially Ryan Harrington, who hunted down, translated, and analyzed manuscripts, manifestos, archival materials, and rare books from libraries and collections all around the world, and Theresa Cullen for her leadership of the Yale Law School Library, without which this project would not have been possible. We are grateful to Stuart Shirrell for his assistance with the data analysis. We are indebted to our research assistants, who brought to the project outstanding legal research skills, analytical expertise, and extraordinary language skills, including Classical Chinese, Latin, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, and Ottoman Turkish: Nico Banac, Jacob Bennett, Perot Bissell, Johannes Buchheim, Varun Char, Idriss Fofana, Jade Ford, Ole Hinz, Michelle Huang, Sameer Jaywant, Aubrey Jones, Tobias Kuehne, Ling-wei Kung, Steve Lance, Ji Ma, Gregor Novak, Pedro Ramirez, Britta Redwood, Bonnie Robinson, Elisa Ronzheimer, James Rumsey-Merlan, Daniel Schwennicke, Ingmar Samyn, Mary Ella Simmons, David Stanton, Evan Welber, and Thorsten Wilhelm. We also thank participants in the Vanderbilt Law School works-in-progress workshop and Yale Law School faculty workshop for their immensely helpful feedback.
The UN Charter provides that states are prohibited from the “threat or use of force” against other sovereign states.
