Book Review: Destroying the Caroline: The Frontier Raid that Reshaped the Right to War, by Craig Forcese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Caroline incident, and the pithy legal test for legitimate self-defence that it spawned, has loomed large in recent debates over anticipatory self-defence and the validity of the “unwilling or unable” doctrine. Yet while everyone knows the bare facts of the case—that the British sank an American steam ship on the American side of the Niagara River in 1837 to prevent it being used by Canadian insurgents—it turns out that the incident has been mischaracterized in ways that are important. Most significant is the largely forgotten fact that the British use of force was in response to ongoing armed attacks and the seizure of territory, not a preemptive strike to forestall future attacks. And it occurred at a time when there was no legal prohibition on the use of force to begin with. Craig Forcese (Univ. of Ottawa) has written what will surely be the seminal work on the incident. It provides a rich and detailed history of the events and the diplomatic dispute that followed, an intellectual history of how the incident came to shape the development of the jus ad bellum regime in international law, and how the case continues to be of significance in current debates over the scope and operation of the doctrine of self-defence. This review essay summarizes the book’s main themes and emphasizes the important contribution it makes to the intellectual history and understanding of the modern jus ad bellum. It also, however, briefly explores the relationship between the Caroline test and current controversies over certain elements of the doctrine of self-defence—particularly imminence and the nature of armed attack—which the book might have analyzed more deeply. It should inspire readers to put this masterful work high on their reading list.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".