Unprecedents

Abstract

In its judicial-doctrinal life, the establishment of an international criminal law has necessitated a sometimes half-hearted search for a history of largely inadequate ‘precedents’ in the context of the punishment of acts that are also said to be ‘unprecedented’ and in the shadow of a suspicion that the criminalization of such acts is itself ‘unprecedented’. Putting all of this together, we might say that what we have is a law of unprecedentedness to which it could be useful to apply a counter-history of unprecedents or unprecedenting or, even, re-precedenting. This idea of ‘unprecedents’ (a neologism that some people will be find unattractive), then, ought to make visible some pathologies, elisions, repressions, around—in one instance a possibility inherent in—international criminal law.