Larry May, Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account (Book Review‪)‬

Larry May, Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xiii + 310 pp. Activists often chide states for not taking international criminal law seriously enough, for not being sufficiently aggressive in preventing and punishing international crimes. It is entirely understandable--and perhaps even somewhat laudable--that people working to assure that perpetrators of the most egregious human rights abuses, such as genocide, torture, and systematic rape, would have little patience for the sorts of technicalities that might bog down prosecutions and even allow criminals to walk away. But taking international criminal law seriously as an institution means taking just as much care with the "technicalities" of proper jurisdiction and defendants' rights as the best domestic systems of law do. Larry May's Crimes Against Humanity is notable for focusing on these two important issues. There is, of course, much else--May takes up customary international law's adequacy (or lack thereof) (40-62), the justification for treating rape as an international crime (96-114), and the specific intent requirement for genocide (167-69), to name but a few of the other topics tackled in this ambitious book.